It pains me to write this – literally. My neck is crooked, one of my wrists feels like it has been trapped in a car door and there's a rapidly calcifying knot of nastiness lurking around my right shoulder blade that caused a masseuse to laugh with sadistic delight, and which goes by the name of The Nub. This is the price one pays for hammering a keyboard like Jerry Lee Lewis all day, every day for 15 years.
I suffer from an increasingly common and entirely self-induced ailment: Repetitive Strain Injury. Fellow sufferers will know exactly how frustrating and limiting these aches and pains can be, and how the claw can strike at any time; for those who have never experienced it, now presents a good opportunity to squeeze in a few sniggering wisecracks about masturbation. (You can do that below).
The causes of RSI are of course widespread – from drilling roads to cutting hair to playing the guitar. But no cause is more common in 2010 than writing. Or, specifically, typing. Unless your work inspires your readers to violence aimed at you, RSI is just about the only injury a writer can get. At one point I calculated I was writing an average of 1,000 words per day in articles, books and blogs for about 300 hundred days a year. That's 300,000 words annually, plus around the same amount again in emails. Multiply all that by however many years and you have someone who takes 10 minutes to get out of bed and sounds like a xylophone when he walks down the street.
In my personal attempt to stem RSI I've been pummelled, had needles stuck in pressure points, had my vertebrae popped by a chiropractor, tried a semi-effective toy-like device called a Powerball and a software recognition programme, taken magnesium tablets (they're a muscle relaxant), dabbled in yoga and been massaged into a hairy lavender-scented heap everywhere from Mytholmroyd to Marrakech. I draw the line at Botox, though, lest my arm develop a petulant pout.
Having blown all my wages on remedies, it seems the only real way to alleviate the ailment is to type less, which isn't easy when your entire working existence takes places electronically, you have book deadlines to meet and writing is all you can do.
Still, it could be worse. I could actually – God forbid – have to do a proper job. Furthermore, though it's perceived as a 21st-century ailment, RSI is actually nothing new. Writers have battled with the repetitive grind through the ages: those of us who suffer today are part of a literary lineage that stretches way back; 19th-century medical books referred to scrivener's palsy, caused by too many hours at the inkwell. Former generations of authors have also been equally inventive in their attempts to self-medicate. Ernest Hemingway famously wrote standing up, on a Royal portable typewriter. So, it seems, did Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Virginia Woolf and now Philip Roth, who suffers from arthritis in one shoulder. Victor Hugo meanwhile wrote in the nude, Edmond Rostand, author of Cyrano de Bergerac, wrote in the bath to avoid interruption and Marcel Proust and Mark Twain both wrote in bed (though not together). While these all make for good anecdotes, it seems unlikely that they can have helped tackle RSI, and would certainly have little effect on the virulent, post-internet strain that is on the rise.
As Alison Flood pointed out last week, we all approach reading from different positions. But do those of us who spend our days typing suffer in the same ways? And if so, does anyone have any tips on how to find pain relief?
If Jean-Dominique Bauby can write a book with his eyelid, then there's no reasons for us RSI-afflicted folks to give up just yet. But I am considering taking up haiku.
