The battle between pen and keyboard: writing tools as influencing writing

One of the best things to happen during my senior thesis of trying to write a manuscript was the first time a computer died on me.  As such, I had to do my drafting and redrafting by hand.  (More info on how this effected my writing here.)

Writing by hand was much more organic.  It is more free.  While the final product will still be prepared to fit into a linear, textual form, the act of creation was not forced artificially to be tidy.  This practice of freedom and possibility opened up new ways of thinking and visualizing the text.  The constant possible distractions of the computer were voided.  There was a bond between creator and creation that was not cast through a vast network of layers.  What I put on the page was seen as coming from me, not a screen.

The early computers were basically giant calculators.  While capable of much more than that now, it is still a world of logics where everything can be written in mathematical codes.  The mathematical nature of computers implies an answer, implies conclusion, implies searching for what is right.  While at times complimentary to the brain that creates art, it is also contradictory.

One of the shifts in my writing since switching from primarily working on computer to primarily working on paper is that I no longer try and find "good" endings.  Things don't have to wrap up.  Some of the best endings to art are the ones that leave you hanging in that world, that give you just enough.  While the mathematical world of the computer suggests one to seek an answer,* one of the many purposes of art is to ask the questions that will lead to continual discovery.  When writing by computer I felt poems needed to build, needed to change, needed to reach some new idea or point.  Now I know they can.  They can also stop in one space and stare into all its hallways.  They can show what all the 99 eyes of Rumor are seeing instead of trying to tell who Rumor is, where it is, where it is going, what will happen, and why that matters.  They can also just be in a moment and a place.

Today, for the first time in a long while I tried to write by computer because I was reimagining a very performance heavy older poem of mine as a prayer that would work just as well on the page.  Really, I just had to slim the first stanza that it is a mixture of a more regular stanza and stage banter and help it transition into the now recontextualized second stanza that I've had memorized for several years.  And then using the computer resulted in getting distracted and preventing myself from thinking into deeper imagery and being too caught up on trying too find a "right" transition that I didn't just brainstorm a bunch of possibilities and see what felt right.  That's when I decided to put that poem down for a while and right this.

Long live the pen and paper.  Long live not trying to find the road to follow, but exploring the paths that you didn't know could be made.

Naturally,
Jason



* That's one of the many reasons why we have search engines like www.ask.com which tries to answer your questions, or www.bing.com which advertises deciding for you, isn't it?

Note: (As mentioned in recent passages, currently reading "The Alphabet vs. The Goddess," and while I had planned to write something on this topic, I do want to credit the book with heightening my thinking around how our communication methods effect what we communicate.)