Write carelessly

#wrightwritesnow 132

I bashed my right knee a treat on the corner of the fridge installed in a hotel room in Porto in February minutes before I had to walk with my luggage to the bus station, itself a mere 7.5 hours away from home sweet home. Composure did not cause the accident, and calm and composed is a difficult attitude to adopt when pain overrides all other considerations. How effing annoying!

This is the memory elicited while sorting through and throwing out papers yesterday, a reaction, I should think, in response to the proliferation in my apartment of canvases bearing wet paint written about in my previous post.

Hotel stationery should always be used and definitely removed if not used during your stay. You never know when you might be struck by the urgent need to write a poem, for instance.

Hotel details hidden behind a yellow serviette I used as blotting paper during a marathon of filling fountain pens with ink ages ago. Serviette is now being used to remove sanding dust from a found picture frame.

I have so many quibbles with the imperative “Write carelessly now”. The first is that horrible little word “now” tagged on the end. My mind springs to phrases gleaned from movies such as “Y’all have a good time, now!” and similar. Also, who is the hotel to tell me to write now? I like to think that my time is my own. Maintaining this illusion preserves my sanity, so leave me be!

Don’t get me started on the word “carelessly”! Even during those mad scribblings I sometimes do in the middle of the night, most often around the time of the full moon, I write with care. This does not mean my handwriting is careful. Uniform, perhaps, but speed prevents neatness, and sometimes legibility to all except me, the potential reader of such guff at a later date.

Writing with care means saying precisely what you mean. Choosing the words that best reflect your thoughts is a lifetime endeavour, for as we discover on our pop-psychology journey, it is only a thought, and a thought can change. And a second consideration, if applicable, is to choose words that make what you write intelligible to the nebulous entity known as the reader.

If you are writing from the core of your being in an attempt to convey exactly what you feel and think, then your mind has no room to accommodate thoughts of who might read what you are writing. That is why the entity is nebulous at this marvellous moment of careful writing. Clarity comes when editing. I work on the assumption that if the writing makes sense to me, it is likely to make sense to others.

The above paragraph does not apply to (usually paid) tasks where we are writing for a target audience. That is real writing’s second cousin twice removed who lives in another town, and possibly dresses funny, while agreeing in a frazzled manner to a management committee’s decision that “Write carelessly now” is the best way to convey a hotel’s corporate image.

By the way, the soap and shower facilities at this hotel were excellent, and the bed was extremely comfortable, so three annoying words on three sheets of their stationery did not provide sufficient distraction while I sat in the early morning at their silly little desk at my laptop editing a client’s signage which will be writ large and everywhere (where everywhere means 18 different countries). Fortunately, this task was complete before I cracked my knee a shot, and decided I might need to write a poem on the three mostly blank sheets of paper now sitting on my desk, months later.

They can stay there until I have decided, with care, what pen I will use. I can see the cows in the distance; they are coming home, although their time of arrival is uncertain.

Did you have objections to the phrase “Write carelessly now”? I am interested to know, so please comment, at length, if you did!

©2026 Allison Wright