Word processing - with pen and paper
Last week someone called me a Luddite. Considering that I have two blogs, a column on The Rumpus, a twitter account, a borderline unhealthy attachment to my iPhone and a possibly waning addiction to Facebook, I’m not sure the label fits. (I also happen to be married to an Apple tech.) But the guy is on to something.
There is my lingering conflict over the gradual disappearance of print. And now there’s my return to writing longhand. (Writing on one of my three vintage typewriters, trendy as that might seem, would just be too clunky.)
I’ve been wrestling with writer’s block for about two years, and it recently dawned on me that part of the problem is how much I’ve come, in that time, to associate my laptop with social networking, and the internet in general. My brain no longer knows how to relate a story through a thrumming electronic device, even when I’ve got Freedom running. Sitting here, I can barely string together anything lengthier or more complex than a 150- to 200-word blog post. There’s too much else vying for my attention.
The computer also presents me with a certain tyranny of choice. It’s too easy to get into obsessively moving pieces around and changing things before I’ve spit out the larger story. Strangely, I am feeling the exact opposite of the way I did in 1987, when I asked my parents for a *word processor* for college graduation, so I could easily cut and paste.
Of course, I’m not planning to toss my current Mac *word processor* any time soon. I’m just getting first drafts of essays and things out on paper. Once I have that beginning, I find the computer’s flexibility useful in shaping and reworking the material. That seems to require a different kind of attention. Also, having unburdened myself of the first draft, I have less of the kind of anxiety I look to quell by zoning out on Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr. At that point I gain a level of engagement with the story that seems to supersede the appeal of knowing what everyone I have ever known, and even not known, is doing and thinking at any given moment.
For whatever it’s worth, this seems to be helping me to chip away at that block.
