Or maybe just old…

… old enough to do nearly all my preliminary and initial writing on actual paper with ink pens. Technically speaking, I almost exclusively use engineering graph paper and various styles and colors of pens. I love to color-code! This is not a Luddite tirade against technology. More than once I’ve made a living installing, building, using and fixing computers. It’s about familiarity with the tools used in my process of writing.

I wasn’t introduced to computers until I entered college. Fortunately my introduction was just after the punch card machine had been removed. There may not be that many who remember the tech that old. It’s more detail than I want to go into here, so I leave it as a Google exercise for the student. The only personal (i.e. non-mainframe) computers were community use machines in the library and the engineering department. They were for students to use for specific exercises, not for programming. So my college years were spent using paper, not electrons. Drafting paper, engineering grid paper, three-ring binders, and spiral notebooks were the tools the students used. Even word-processing done on the library computers were printed and turned in on paper, not digitally. Hard to believe, I know.

New-fangledness

Enter a new century and computers are ubiquitous, relatively cheap, and with programming that is just shy of magical to someone who didn’t own a personal computer until 3 years after graduating college.

I’ll let you contemplate that for a moment.

Nowadays there are three different computers within sight of my writing desk, including a laptop that likely has more processing capability than the mainframe I first worked on. Not only that, they aren’t monochrome monitors like my first work computer used. No, that’s not a joke. So with all this amazing technology, why in the world do I use paper? Primarily because, discounting the mylar I used for architectural/engineering purposes, good ink on good paper is the most durable and longest-lasting medium storage medium.

I’ll wait until you stop laughing.

I have perfectly usable books that were published more than 60 years ago. They are far from rare first-editions; most of them are mass market. I can’t even access the data or the storage medium that was used in computers even 20 years ago. And in another 20 years, I’ll be using something that I can’t imagine that won’t even resemble what I use today. Nor will it be able to use the same hardware as 20 years previously.

But my paper books will still be there far more than 20 years. As a matter of fact, barring disaster they’ll be used quite a bit beyond my lifetime. They’ll still work without requiring electricity (unless Amazon decides to finish conquering the world) and I know exactly where to find the information that I’m looking for. I will still have paper copies of what I wrote 20 or 30 years ago that I’ll only need hands and eyes to use.

Computers are so prevalent now that I’m sure very little that happens in my daily routine doesn’t involve one somewhere along the way. There’s one in my water heater for crying out loud. I use them everyday, such as writing what you’re reading, but I use a lot of paper. Paper (and books especially) involve more senses than computers require. I find it easier to remember which shelf a specific book lives on than which directory and sub-folder holds a poem I wrote 5 years ago. As for writing, I learned long ago that the physical act of writing something down ingrained the information in a way that computers can’t. But I use computers every single day.

Computers are invaluable aids. Computers let me change what I’ve done MUCH faster than I can rewrite. They let me reference and integrate material that would take me days to do manually. They let me research and codify information that just 75 years ago would literally have take lifetimes to accomplish. I love having the world at my fingertips. I can literally carry a library’s worth of reference material in one hand. I can change fonts, spacing, formatting, margins and a hundred other things that previously would have taken days to hours if not days to complete. Computers check grammar and spelling and help my writing in many other ways, such as being able to reach out to you in this blog.

But while a computer can check my spelling, it will happily let me use the wrong word as long as it’s spelled correctly. So, I still have my copies of Strunk & White’s Elements of Style. I still read books. I still print online material so I can file it into my own system. Perhaps one day a computer will write stories and comics indistinguishable from those created by people. For now, though, it’s still much easier for me to grab a red pen than figure out which combination of clicks and keys will turn just four words out of one sentence to red. I’m getting much better at it, though. For now, though, something things like color-coding are easier for me to do manually.

And I really like to color-code.

DDW