The Tyranny of Digital

Pixels vs paper

Sometimes the tools we choose hinder our writing process–or the tools we’re forced to choose because they’re the ones most in vogue.

I turned eighteen in 1984, so I spent my formative writing years in a pre-digital, pre-mobile device world. Hell, it wasn’t just the formative years. Let’s be generous: good word processing didn’t take hold until the 90s. The iPhone and the iPad are both too young to drive, let alone drink. But–and it’s a big but–digital latched on with such strong talons, it’s hard to imagine a world without it.

I’m not going to go over the benefits of writing digitally because I’m cranky and mean.

Let’s focus instead on the downsides.

The obvious one is having a robot correct and suggest content. The robot is often bad at fixing grammar and spelling–mainly because he has a poor appreciation for context. But the worst problem, the truly insidious one, is what I call the It Looks Done So It Is Done Phenomenon (or ILDSIID). When you type onto a simulated page with a nice font, your work, despite whatever sorry shape it might be in, looks ready for public consumption. It causes writers to publish early, and avoid the pesky step of proofing and copy editing. ILDSIID is responsible for the current state of writing on the Internet.

And, as I’m sure you’ve divined, that state ain’t good.

Here was my writing method before ILDSIID became the scourge that it is. I had two spiral notebooks. I wrote my first draft in notebook A. Then I wrote my second draft in notebook B. My third draft went back into notebook A. Usually, three drafts were enough to get me to either a typewriter or a proto-digital device. Of course, all three iterations were done longhand, and that’s a good thing. With longhand, you can scratch things out, draw arrows, or draw a cute cartoon bunny when the words won’t come. And, at the risk of sounding spacey, you develop a more spiritual connection with what you’ve done. The duet between your brain and your hand produces an organic result.

When I write on a laptop (or a phone, or a tablet) I’m much more likely to hit “publish” before…

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