Technology Kills.

Well, technology can kill writing, anyway.

See, I had this wonderful post. I had carefully chosen every word and even managed to insert a bit of humor into it. It was beautiful! And then... Firefox froze.

Now, I hadn't finished the post yet, and so I just hit Ctrl-c. My shortcut to everything.

Except when I shut down Firefox, opened a new window, and went to paste my post back in... it wasn't there. It didn't copy. And you know what? I don't feel like replicating it. Technology has officially given me writer's block.

See, that never happens with good old-fashioned paper and pencil. The page won't freeze, you never have to refresh it or worry about slow loading times. You can't get a virus from a notebook (although you can certainly get a papercut), and your pencil will never write the letters slower than you input them.

I suppose the downside to the traditional writing materials is that you can't easily share it with others. Online, I can simply type in my post, hit Submit, and BAM! The whole world can see it in a few seconds. Not that I use that for my work - I'd rather not submit my work to hundreds of greedy eyes until it's almost perfect. I'm just that squeamish about criticism of my precious.

For now, I think the old way of writing is the right one for me. Although I suppose I'll have to get over that sooner or later - after all, I can't very well submit this post without overcoming that frustration.

Now, off to battle Windows-induced writer's block...

That's why I always write long posts in Word .

Sureal wrote:That's why I always write long posts in Word .

That's why I always write any entry — long or short — in Notepad.

For me, using the computer to write isn't a matter of showing it to other people; I personally think technology brings writing to a whole new level. See, the problem with paper and pencil is that the pencil can only go as fast as I can write. Which isn't very fast at all. Plus, if I try to write for a few hours in a row, chances are that my wrists will be killing me when I'm done.

But the computer? I can type reasonably fast (I think), and so what ends up happening is that I can keep typing at the same rate that my thoughts flow. And when I'm really into a story/poem/whatever, I type faster, and I end up typing a lot of thoughts before I consciously process them. So, basically, I have no conscious idea what I'm writing about. The actual writing becomes a blur — yes, a good blur — and it's kind of like achieving writing nirvana. That's my favourite thing about writing, I think, because that particular experience is so exhilirating, and 98.9% of the time, the writing that I do then is a lot better than my usual writing.

Pen and paper is a LOT more laborious, and that whole writing nirvana thing never happens. Plus, I can only write for so long before my wrists stage a rebellion.

Hahaha... I write about the same time I type, so... what is a writing nirvana for you is just me being mindless and/or exhausted. XD

But still! Word has this handy thing that, if there is a blackout, it automatically saves your work, even if you don't save it, and then when you bring it back up, it's there! This is REALLY good for me, because I tend to get writer's block if it dies on me and I have to retype.

And notebooks are always good...

Aw, I feel sorry for you, Crysi. I sacrificed Chapter 4 of the Chair to computer heaven not too long ago, stupid electrical outage... -_-

Backups people... Quite simple actually.

I long-hand everything before I even think of inserting it into a machine that has the potential to devour my brilliance.