How Does Your Garden Grow?

Quite contrarily, I find.

Yesterday I went to the firing range to take the same class Terrie and Clare took a few weeks back. While there, I had a discussion with two of my classmates over lunch about how we write. I've always believed that one reason I write everything by hand is that I am not, strictly speaking, a child of the computer era. My first computer was a 512kE Mac, bought when I was in grad school. So I had already had years of manuscripts behind me before I tried computers.

But these women were older than I am and one of them writes everything on the computer. She says her hands move faster on the computer than they do on the page, so the computer allows her to keep up with her thoughts. But after six years of working chat rooms for AOL, my fingers move pretty darned fast on the keyboard, so that's not what prevents me from using the computer to draft or to edit. (When I edit, I print everything out and then edit by hand. I'm on a first name basis with the woman at the copy and print center at my local Staples.)

Nor is it my love of fountain pens that compels me to write by hand.

No, there is something about the flow of ink across the page that allows me to think creatively.

When I was writing analytical, theoretical work for academia, I wrote and edited everything on the computer. That work was quite creative, too, but I suspect it came from a different area of the brain, an area not triggered by ink and paper.

I wish the reverse was true. That is, I write a heck of a lot more words of fiction (and I have a heck of a lot more editing of those words to do) than I ever did of analysis. It would be far easier and more efficient if I could do that work on the keyboard. But no, as everything in life, my nature is contrary.