Handwritten vs Digital
The pen is mightier than the sword, they say, but than the keyboard?
The pen is mightier than the sword, they say, but than the keyboard? For over 25 years now, I’ve jotted and scrawled obsessively — addictively, I think, is not too strong a word. What was I writing? Why was it important? And why did I use a pen?
The last point first: I haven’t always used a pen. Early on, I’d write directly to the keyboard, even when writing the journal-entries which would later seem unthinkable without pen and paper. My father, a freelance journalist, had brought home an early Amstrad desktop word-processor in the eighties, and it was on this behemoth that I’d written my first short stories, all but the earliest of them direct to digital, with the aid of a few hand-jotted notes. But the Amstrad was doomed, its floppy discs incompatible with any of the later computers which would come and go throughout my life. No doubt someone somewhere could have transferred the data, but at the time I didn’t know that, and the thing sat in the shed in the damp and dust till one day I switched it on and… nothing. It took with it every one of my early stories. There were printed versions, of course, of all but the one I’d gone up to the shed looking for: a long (7000-word) improvised piece called “Ascending the Black Tower”, which I’d written in two sittings after my first reading of The Trial. At the time, I guess, I hadn’t valued the thing; it was rough, unwieldy, unpublishable. In retrospect, though, it was the missing link. Kafka hadn’t been a detour, he’d been the way! But the Amstrad had eaten him. Lesson #1: Digital is delicate.
I didn’t learn. In the early nineties, at the height of what I then believed was my “writing career”, I leased my first laptop — a Sharp, I think, with 48K RAM and LCD — and, in the first flush of my excitement, wrote everything on it, from stories to journal (the first and only time I’d ever put my journal in the digital realm), until the house was burgled, the laptop stolen. Years later, I’m still mourning the loss of those stories, fragmentary though they were; and Breaking Glass (Part II of my psychedelic-pulp saga COQworks) is all the poorer for it. Lesson #2: Digital is desirable.
Lesson #3? I think of the times I’ve sat down at a computer to write and been stumped — by the pressure, by the overt sense of ceremony. Also, how once the laptop was gone I bought another hulking secondhand desktop. Digital is deskbound? Not always, of course, not these days, but in my case it seems so. In 2014 I bought my current computer, a 17-inch 2011 MacBook Pro — great for music production, but it’s heavy, and a power-hog; I don’t like to use it without a power-source since it developed problems charging. Thus to write on it anywhere but at home is to lug both 2kg laptop and MagSafe adaptor, ideally to a place where I can plug it in. Did I mention pressure? Excessive sense of ceremony. You haul that thing with you and you’d better have a reason for it.
The pen, then, is portable. I can whip it out anywhere — café, park, train, bus — and put it away as quickly if inspiration doesn’t strike me. Also, the pen both frees and restricts, and both effects — freeing and restricting — I suspect, assist my thought-process. The pen frees with motion. Just keep the hand moving; thought will follow. Unlike typing, handwriting is fluid. Slower too, less jerky, with less stops and starts. And in this slow-unfolding, smooth dance of the hand lies a revelation in waiting. Pen is perpetual. And forward-moving: I can’t erase or doctor, not without defacing, nor leaving a trace of my supposed “mistakes” — which mistakes, as I suspect we’ve all wondered who’ve deleted a sentence no sooner was it written, might well have been crucial (missing links, lost pieces to the puzzle). Pen is perennial.
So much for “why”. But what was I writing, and why was it important?
At first, I wrote all kinds of things: ideas for novels, stories, films, even theatre; fragments; lyrics (I never wrote poetry, not back then, and rarely now). But mostly I wrote my very personal and very mundane journal. At first, I compartmentalised: one notebook for fiction, one for music, one for journal. At the peak of my output I had an individual notebook for each major prose project. A pile of books. At that time, with the bulk of my moving ahead of me, and with most of my writing done at home, it still seemed feasible to require so much luggage. But when I gave up writing for publication — something I did abruptly, over the course of six months or so, without really knowing I was doing it — I also rejected the multiple-compartments system.
By then I was in Melbourne, with much of the stuff I’d carted to Tasmania (books and notebooks, mainly) in storage in Adelaide. By then, too, I’d started to write in public — in cafés, libraries, parks, anywhere but my deskless sharehouse bedroom. And, as it sank in how far away I felt from my fiction, my journaling took me over. For months I’d write nothing but banal “personal notes” (as I labelled them), with maybe a hidden line or paragraph every 20–50 pages regarding fiction. I felt as if I was throwing those few ideas away, ultimately, because increasingly I doubted I’d ever read all that outpouring. Which, really, is all most of it was: outpouring.
So why was it important? I don’t know if it was, in the long-term. When (as I rarely do) I look back on it now, I seem to have been repeating myself with the slightest of variations for twenty years. It’s not for posterity, then — but I always knew that. I remember during one particularly dark period in my early twenties (1995? 1996?), when it still seemed likely, not merely possible, that an audience of many could one day be curious about such material, I made the decision that my journals were for my eyes only. (This followed an experimental phase — no longer than a week or two — in which I wrote, consciously, as if I expected to be read, a stultifying and semi-paralysing experience which decided me forever, I thought, or at least for the next 20 years.) The question, then, is what is it for, that cathartic self-analysis, except to get me through the day? And yes, if it has achieved that — if it has gotten me through the past 6000+ days until now — then, I guess, it was worthwhile. But still it troubles me, this — to the wider world — useless outlay of writerly energy, this siphoning of emotion into vessels which seem fit only for burning. What might I have written instead? And, by sharing it with others, what might I have learned?
The occasion of the birth of this blog, then, is that feeling. An addiction — I’ve often suspected my journal-writing is little more than that. But I need to write. Can I transfer the impetus to self-analyse into something worthwhile on a broader scale — worthwhile to others? My resolve, for now, is to try: to not write anything (if possible) that is not intended to communicate. At least for a while, till I redress the balance between public and private.