Michelle Richmond is The New York Times bestselling author of nine books of fiction. Her Paris spy novel Animals of the French Species, inspired by her expat years in Paris, will be published in January.
If all this talk of AI in publishing is getting you down—AI scandals, AI-generated books, the new onus on writers to prove that our work is our own—you may have nostalgia for a time when most of us had never thought much about AI. Which was only three to four years ago. Although it’s impossible to ignore the implications of AI, it is possible to tune out the noise and reclaim some writing joy by returning to simple analog pleasures.
To wit (I’ve always wanted to use that phrase in a sentence), here are five analog things to make you happy.
A big pile of books
I started stacking books in my house years ago when all the shelves overflowed. As you know, stacks have a way of getting taller and spawning smaller stacks.
I often get frustrated with myself for book “clutter.” On the other hand, I’m constantly reaching into my stacks and finding something I didn’t know I needed at that very moment.
Can you really call it clutter if it serves a purpose every single day and brings you joy and comfort on the regular? Marie Kondo would say yes, but Marie Kondo, perhaps, never closed her eyes, pointed, and resurfaced with Tales of the City by or Flights by Olga Tokarczuk or Some Pleasant Daydream by Jiri Kajane.
Today, celebrate your physical book stacks. Reach in, find something, and read.
Or take it a step further and rearrange your book stacks. Move the stacks from the bedroom into the living room and vice versa. Redistribute the weight, making nice little pyramids of big to small, to impose a temporary symmetry. Or let them tumble. You’ll probably find a treasure in the chaos.
A pen and notebook
I like a Le Pen pen in indigo (sounds French but they’re made in Japan by Marvy Uchida) and a Moleskine notebook (the smoothest pages, the sturdiest covers!), but I also love my notebooks from Librarie Galignani in Paris.
I used to buy a notebook every time I wandered into Galignani, which was often, as it was right down the street from the US Embassy. The notebooks have thick paper covers, unlined pages, and come in only two colors—mustard yellow and deep red. I wrote scraps of my forthcoming novel in those notebooks, as well as random journal entries. I have them scattered about the house, in various stages of emptiness and abandonment. I just bought another one in July of this year.
As it happens, Librarie Galignani features prominently in my forthcoming espionage novel, Animals of the French Species, so I’m using one of my Librarie Galignani notebooks to keep track of things I need to keep track of—bookstores I hope to visit, festivals I’d like to attend, podcasts I want to approach—all those little things that can easily get lost in the shuffle.
Do you like novels set in modern-day Paris?
You can preorder Animals of The French Species here.
A printable coffee date with yourself
is the Bay Area journalist behind the Substack — “a journalist’s approach to everyday life through essays, illustrations, travel notes, and creative assignments.”
It turns out, Charlene likes coffee as much as I do! She created a printable, foldable “coffee notes zine” for you to take with you to your favorite coffee shop. All you need is a piece of paper, a printer, and your pen.
As I thought about this week’s Travel Note, I had the idea to let you experience getting coffee like a reporter on assignment. I created a mini zine with your instructions. I chose the small zine format because as a journalist on assignment, I always carry a tiny reporter’s notebook.
Coffee—However You Take It, However You Make It
I’ve been a morning person for as long as I remember, but it recently occurred to me that maybe the reason I’m a morning person is that I’m always excited to get out of bed to make coffee. I brew a pot every morning in my Tehnivorm Mochamaster, using beans from Philz.
However you make it, wherever you buy it, coffee is a true analog pleasure. Of course, I’m biased (this newsletter is called The Caffeinated Writer for a reason), but coffee is the perfect, no-drama writer’s companion.
I love coffee so much I wrote a novel featuring a coffee buyer as protagonist. There’s a lot of coffee in it. A lot. An acquaintance once said to me at a party, “Why do all your books have so much coffee in them? Every other page, somebody is drinking a cup of coffee.”
Well, when you put it that way. What can I say? On every other page of my life, someone is drinking coffee, and that person is me. Maybe my coffee addiction is why I love Scandinavian crime novels, where some crusty detective with a bad car and a broken marriage is always pouring himself another cup of coffee.
Coffee is one of the true analog joys. Making it is tactile, not to mention old-school ASMR—the tumbling of beans into the grinder, the whir of the blades, the sifting sound of the ground coffee hitting the paper filter, the gurgle of the coffee maker, the water gurgling up from the water reservoir and dripping into the brew basket.
And when it’s done, you get to pour the coffee and have the first sip. Of course, the most famous connection between coffee and the writing life is Honore de Balzac’s habit of drinking fifty cups a day, which writes about in Balzac on Coffee.
And so coffee brought out both the best and the worst in Balzac. By today’s standards he would have been considered quite manic.
I try to drink just enough to give me energy without making my bounce off the walls. Like a good book, coffee makes me want to write. I’m drinking coffee right this minute.
A Typewriter
There’s no beating the tactile joy of a typewriter. If you’re of a certain age, you might remember typing class. I learned to type in a big typewriting classroom at Murphy High School in Mobile, Alabama. It was a noisy operation, all those machines clacking and clanging at once. The typing room was on the second floor of the main building. We had no air conditioning, and it gets hot in Mobile.
Over the years, I’ve collected a few typewriters, the most useful of which is an IBM Selectric (I wrote a few dozen pages of a novel on it), the most beautiful of which is an Hermes 3000 (I rarely touch it and mostly just gaze at it lovingly).
My friend Wade Williams, one of my favorite writers in the world, just joined Substack, and he shared a photo of his latest typewriter here:
True story: once upon a time, a thousand years ago in graduate school, I wrote a short story with Wade and this other guy in our writing workshop, Kevin. The way the workshop operated was that you distributed the story in the mailboxes of every writer in the class. You weren’t allowed to put your name on the story, and the students didn’t know the workshop schedule, which was supposed to prevent everyone from judging based on whether or not they liked the writer. Every story was anonymous.
Which was, in theory, a great idea. But a few weeks into the semester, we could all generally tell who wrote what. So the story we wrote together, “The Barnette Dairyette Suite,” confused everyone. Was it Wade’s story? Was it Kevin’s story? Was it my story? Nobody knew. The professor was annoyed with us. But to this day, that’s my favorite story I wrote in graduate school, even though I only wrote a third of it.
Wade probably typed his third on a typewriter. I typed mine on my MacDuoDoc. I don’t remember what Kevin typed his on. He lived in a basement apartment and had no idea I was angling to marry him.
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Do you have a typewriter? Do you drink coffee? Do you still use notebooks? I’d love to hear about all your writerly analog pleasures in the comments!
For further reading
Walking by Erling Kagge
Coffee for Here, “a newsletter about coffee and humanity from your friendly neighborhood barista,” Morgan Eckroth, the 2022 USA Barista Champion and author of the forthcoming book Coffee for Here: The Ultimate Handbook for At-Home Coffee Enthusiasts
on the lost physical objects of the pre-digital world and a wonderful interview with of A Reading Life
And, if I may be so bold: Animals of the French Species, my espionage novel set in Paris, inspired by my years as a trailing spouse with the US Embassy in the City of the Light, is now available for preorder.
You can preorder Animals of the French Species here (which would mean the world to me), or read about the inspiration behind the book.
As always, happy writing!
~Michelle
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