Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Typed-vs.-Handwritten

Sad news.  My laptop battery's dead.  Like, dead dead, as in This thing won't charge even if I plug it in, and I am officially going to die.
[Photo credit link]
    Scratch that.  It's been like this for about a week now -- we couldn't order my new battery while everybody was at Falls Creek, so it got pushed off.  I'm pretty sure it's been ordered,  but by now I'm half-dead.  It's like some natural extension of my hands has been lopped off, you know?

    Okay, so I probably seem a little . . . I hesitate to say "dramatic," but sure, something like that.  Really, though, this is a majorly bad situation.  I write with my laptop.  Blog with it.  That's where all the pictures I've taken go (I take a lot of photos), and I can't upload more and clear out my camera's memory card until the laptop's back. 

    Basically, everything revolves around the laptop. 

    So all this woe's got me thinking.  I used to do everything by hand, before I got my computer.  I could've used the house computer, and I occasionally used the desktop that used to be in my room -- but I usually chose to do things by hand.

    On one hand, that makes some sense.  I wasn't committed to a single story concept back then, so I never really typed things to print them out.  Obviously, notebooks are a heck of a lot more portable than desktop computers, so there's that.  And I was only writing for myself at that point -- no one else ever read my stuff, which I'm thankful for now --, so there was no reason to type it up to print.  (Not to mention the issue of trying to blog with a notebook.  Let me know how that one works out, all right?)

    But now I simply can't function without computers.  Instead of scribbling out whole lines of handwriting, I say hello the the Backspace button.  Copying, pasting, spellcheck.  Emailing the document, and not having to type it all out again later on after writing it in my notebook.  I can type faster than I can write things out, and there's always the plethora of fonts out there to choose from.  I'm a total font nerd, so that makes most of the decision for me.

    I've heard that writing by hand gets your creative juices flowing better than typing, but that doesn't hold any weight for me.  Maybe it's because I'm used to all things digital, but things just seem smoother with typing.  It's easier, less of a hassle.  Especially on laptop keys -- my fingers are a lot more prone to stumble when I'm using a regular keyboard.  And while I really don't care about it, I'm sure I make tree-hugging hippes proud of the paper I save.

    Until I print it all out, of course.  

    Of course, I'm not saying I don't like doing things by paper.  I always print my manuscript out for editing -- I catch a lot more mistakes that way --, and if I'm writing poetry, I actually prefer paper.  (Not sure why, but whatever.)

    But everyone's different.  What do you prefer -- keyboard, or notebook? 

3 comments:

grantistheman94 said...

Keyboard, usually

Natalie Aguirre said...

I could not survive without a computer anymore. Revising would be way too hard. And I revise a lot.

emii said...

Hmm. I write in my diary every night -- and that's by hand. But with anything else -- like writing my novel or blog post or anything like that -- definitely laptop. And I know what you mean -- I always mess up on a normal keyboard, I SO prefer laptops!:)