Do you write in a notebook or do you type on the screen? As a Journalist and creative writer I have dabbled in both and I must say like Natasha Bedingfield’s noughties anthem “I am Unwritten”, and “staring at the blank page before you, open up the dirty window…”. You get my drift. The dirty window in this case is the ten or so tabs I have distracting me at any time.
When I am in it, in the flow of writing, I literally feel different parts of my brain activating. I often feel very emotive writing longhand especially if it’s a scene with a character that means a lot to me. That pull in the deep dark depths of your ribcage is the writer’s nirvana. Feeling as you write and if you do a good enough job your reader will almost certainly feel it too.
I love seeing the page full to the brim with writing. Even after years of writing practice, it makes my stomach flip. Do we have that same feeling when we write using our keyboards? I am not too convinced. It seems we are primed to read never-ending streams of text these days-just look at the success of social media platforms such as Twitter. How is this all going to affect our writing systems as future generations use Chromebooks in the classroom? The move to digital is a saviour for children who need special adaptations in the classroom. We can already anticipate a blended future of tech and writing. The new tech that we use now is microchips and screens and years ago it would have been a stone tablet, a wall or stretched animal skin. The fundamentals are still the same. We are still communicating and writing just the tools have changed.
I went through a phase of wanting to write in different colours as a visual way of tracking my progress. Do we feel that same sense of progress when we save a document file on our desktop? Sometimes never to be seen again… One thing we lose through our move to digital is the serendipitous nature of lost notes. Especially personal intimate love notes that provide a window into a relationship. I don’t think my kids will be trawling through my old floppy disks in the same way and getting misty-eyed.
Historians and linguists have learnt about so many people and the lives they live from the notes that have been left behind. It could be a shopping list from the 1930s or a love letter from a forbidden love in Regency England. We all leave behind traces of ourselves in paper form and when we look back we feel the present pressed firmly into the palm of our hands. Digital or paper.