Goatskins.

Last night on Twitter, a friend compared restructuring her novel to climbing Everest without gear or a guide. My response?

“People have lived on Everest without modern technology, climbing pitons, nylon rope, or expensive cold-weather gear. If people can survive on Everest with fires, huts, and goat skins, you can make this novel work.”

Fortunately she was smart enough to get what I was driving at despite my muddled analogy, and dove into her goatskin hut to get some work done. But the conversation left me thinking, during my usual bout of late-night insomnia:

Books were once scratched out in cuneiform on clay tablets, each word a painstaking labor, each page heavier than an entire hardcover book. Parchment and ink were probably a miraculous invention to the Babylonians and Assyrians, and still light-years behind typewriters we now consider primitive. For centuries our written literature was transcribed entirely by hand, with archaic tools; it may have been time-consuming, may have been difficult, but they got it done. Here we sit surrounded by high-end computers, specialized word processors, plotting and diagramming programs, printers that can spew out a dozen copies of a manuscript in a fraction of the time a Benedictine monk might have spent copying a single page by hand. Research tools are only a click away, with the internet instantly delivering information to save us the month-long trek by ass donkey to look up one Latin phrase in an obscure, crumbling book stashed somewhere in the Carpathian mountains.

So why the hell do we turn writing into such a difficult process?

Maybe we’ve made it too easy. Maybe without the dedication required of more traditional forms of transcription, we’ve lost the discipline and patience necessary to the art of writing. Maybe it’s time to climb our personal Everests without the thousands of dollars in specialized gear and the rescue helicopter hovering overhead – and maybe with the shiny, distracting toys taken away, we’ll learn how to work with our words rather than struggling against them and making the process more difficult than it has to be.

So step away from the internet. Close Facebook. Close Photoshop. Close that game. Close your e-mail. Close Wikipedia, too (what are you doing fact-checking there, anyway?). If you’re not inclined to write by hand, then close everything that isn’t just you and your words. No shiny plotting tools; no easy outlining programs; no fancy fonts and formats. Just you, the words, and an empty page.

And wrap yourself in your goatskins to just write.