I have come away without a laptop so, for the first time in 35 years, I have been forced to write something using pen and paper. My last attempt, for my finals at university rather than an online column, didn’t go well. I thought I was going to get a first and was bitterly disappointed with a 2:2. The problem may have been that the examiners were unable to read my handwriting. It may also have been the case that my answers weren’t very good.
Writing in ink – be it using a pen or a typewriter – turns out to be shockingly different from writing on a computer. For a start, you can’t write down any old tosh with the intention of sorting it out later. Well, I suppose you could, but it would be tricky, with all sorts of crossings-out and stuff. So, alarmingly, you have to apply some thought to the matter. You have to think through the next sentence, from beginning to end, before you put pen to paper, and also have an idea of how that sentence might open a door to the subsequent sentence. This requires planning, and I’m terrible at planning anything, including, it turns out, sentences.
To think, until nearly the end of the last century, everyone had to write like this. There must be accomplished, successful writers now who wouldn’t have made it without the advent of word processing.
How on earth did Dickens, Austen, Tolstoy, the Brontës et al manage to write novels like this? Or perhaps it was to their advantage, to be forced to stop and think before writing – stopping to think before acting being a skill that the 21st century is slowly but surely knocking out of us.
They were also spared the tyranny of endless options, the paralysis of choices, that now encumber us on our screens, where we can fiddle and revise and continually alter. In life, as in writing, instead of stopping to think beforehand, we are cursed with the opportunity to overthink afterwards, with all the misery that can bring.
NB: My handlers at the Guardian couldn’t read my handwriting, so I’ve had to transcribe my scribbles on to a computer after all. I promise that I almost didn’t change a word.
Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
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