The Future of Writing

I hesitate to even post on this, because I feel like I’ve written too many “does the dominance of computers spell the end of __________” entries over the life of this blog.  But for whatever reason, when I was out riding my bike this weekend, this question came into my head: what is the future of writing?  We’ve certainly talked about the future of reading here before, but what about its counterpart?

I don’t really have to write anything by hand at work (and actually, I think I’ve probably printed less than 30 pages for business purposes in the almost five months I’ve been at Google).  I do jot down a few bullets when an attorney comes by to give me an assignment, or I’ll throw a few reminders on a sticky note if I’m afraid I’ll forget something.  At home, I’m mostly electronic as well.  Besides signing checks, writing thank you notes, or putting together a grocery list, all of my personal “inputting” is digital.

Earlier this year when I was traveling for work, I decided to ask the young attorney I was assisting for tips from his days at law school.  His number one piece of advice to me was, “No matter what your classmates do, do not take notes on your computer.”  He went on to explain that there’s nothing wrong with taking notes on your computer, per se.  It’s certainly easier at the time of the notetaking to do it that way.  But by writing notes by hand, you a) spend that much more effort and time forming the words, and thus thinking about them; b) are not distracted by the dozen other things you can do on your computer instead of paying attention; and c) have that much more of a motivation, when it comes down to studying for an exam, to type up your notes.  This is what I did in college, and I think it played a large part in whatever success I had at tests (personally, I’d write a paper any day over taking a test).

Actually, the first time I did this was in 9th grade.  When it came time for my biology exam at the end of the year, our teacher told us that we could bring in one 5″x8″ index card with whatever information we wanted on it.  Already a computer geek by that age, I decided that I’d do this on the computer where I could type and print much smaller than I could write.  I spent most of the weekend before the exam on that card: inputting information from my notebook, moving it around, and organizing it so I could find it quickly and easily on test day.

By the end of the weekend, I had spent so much time thinking about the information and how to organize it on the card that a lot of it was already seared into my brain.  Little by little, I was deleting more and more of the basic and medium-level information from the card and adding in the detailed, specific stuff that was much harder to retain.  When it came to exam time, I barely needed the card.  The card was already in my brain.

I think it will be important, as my generation grows up and starts to raise the next one, for us to retain and encourage this skill.  While writing by computer offers the advantages of speed and easy editing, that doesn’t mean that it is wholly “better.”  In a recent article on The Guardian‘s Books Blog, Alison Flood compares contemporary writing strategies to the method employed by Jack Kerouac with On The Road (emphasis mine):

These days, the computer is the writing implement of choice. It allows us to delete, shift sections around and continually edit, in the way that Kerouac, writing on his lengthy scrolls, could not.

The typewriter/computer/notebook are, of course, just the instruments of the trade, but it’s possible they have more influence on the eventual product than we think. Paul Auster, for example, writes by hand in notebooks, revising each paragraph until he feels it works – and I think his polished, elegant prose reflects this.

Terry Pratchett, meanwhile, is a typer, and says that one effect of his Alzheimer’s has been to interrupt the flow between brain and touch-typing: “I type badly, worse than I ever did, and that’s a big drawback, as you and many journalists will appreciate, because the process of typing is the process of thinking: one activity drives the other, so I find myself hunting and pecking and that makes the thinking and the flow jerky.”

Of course, wannabe Kerouacs could always snap up their own Olivetti and bundle in the rolls of paper, but it seems to me that the birth of the computer has led, largely, to the death of the genuine stream of consciousness novel.

I feel like I always come back to the same advice when writing posts like these: Moderation is the key.  Just because something is easier or convenient, doesn’t mean it’s the best.  After all, while it’s important for us to strive after innovation to help remove some of the friction in our lives… what is a world without friction?  What is a world without effort or struggle or pain?  Just as it’s important to have tools that give us speed and the ability to revise, it’s also important to cultivate habits of taking one’s time, and getting it right the first time.  While we don’t have to force ourselves to use these old habits exclusively (as some purists would have us do), the skills and lessons that those habits teach us — and taught generations of people before us — are still important to cultivate.

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user _StaR_DusT_.