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May 01, 2005
Technology Sucks: An Ode to the Lowly Pencil
Hello, and welcome to the thirty-fifth installment of NotWriting.com, an open journal on how one writer spends his time when he really should be writing.
Before my darling wife bought me my two new Macs——an eMac for the office and an iBook for the road——I was starting to really hate computers.
Now don't worry, this isn't an ad for Apple. Rather, I want to sing the virtues of that great anti-technology writing device, the lowly pencil.
Case in point, over the years I’ve done a lot of my real writing——fiction, journal, and articles——in pencil. Yes, pencil. For those of you who've forgotten what a pen-cil looks like, here's one:
Writing in pencil suits me so well that I now keep a minimum of two dozen pencils stacked on my desk like cordwood. To ensure ice-pick sharp points, I go through one Staedtler barrel pencil sharpener every four days (68¢ at Office Depot—they come in translucent red, yellow, and blue). As each sharpener goes dull, I put it into a graveyard of sharpeners that have lost their edge. I’m notorious for pressing down extra-hard on my pencils, so a sharpened tip is good for only three lines or so.
After working with at least a dozen brands of pencils, I’ve discovered that the two best are the Mirado Black Warrior (John Steinbeck’s choice because it was round and therefore easier on the fingers during long writing sessions) and the Staedtler ‘Noris ergosoft’ (an ergonomic, triangular-shaped pencil).
I enjoy writing in pencil for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that when I sit down, I don’t get error messages or interruptions from anti-virus software asking me if I want to allow such-and-such file to download to my computer. There’s nothing stopping you with a pencil——no software conflicts, no tweaking the fonts to get the look on the screen Goldilocks (my shorthand for just right——pass it along), and no temptations to check your email.
Yessir, writing in pencil is what I call elemental——there’s you, the pencil, the paper, and a sharpener. Light is also helpful, so you can throw that in there. Bottom line: there’s no fancy-pants technology bullshit clogging everything up. It’s about doing the writing, not about screwing with the technology.
In my opinion, we’ve allowed technology to get away from us. Once upon a time, computers and all of their offspring were tools designed to help us do whatever work needed to be done. In the case of writing, the idea was that we writers could write more material faster using a word processor. Again, the idea was that the tools would help us, but did they? It seems to me that we writers spend a substantial amount of our time playing with or fighting with the tools themselves. To wit:
“Hmm, I wonder what this would look like in Arial?”
“Should I bold that or not?”
“Let’s check the word count again…”
“Damn it, why won’t this indent?”
“I’ve got it, I'll put this chapter in column format so I can see what it will look like when it’s published as a paperback! That way, I’ll know whether it looks right or not…”
“If that f-cking wizard shows his face one more time, I’m going to smash the screen with a hammer!”
You get the idea. Distracting. Sophistimicated.
With the pencil, there’s none of that. Oh, I suppose you could drive yourself nuts in the quest for the sharpest pencil on earth, but that’s about as bad as the distractions get.
Besides reducing distractions, writing with a pencil physically connects the writer with the page. If you’re a decent typist, it’s nearly impossible to hand-write as fast as you would type, so working with a pencil forces you to slow down and frame your thoughts more carefully.
So, given the superiority of the pencil, what should you do? Why, throw out your computer, of course. Pencils are cleaner, happier, and in the hands of non-insane people, a lot safer.
If you want learn more about pencils, here's a nice encyclopedia article on them. Enjoy.
And thanks for making NotWriting your choice for procrastinatey goodness. Have a nice day.
Posted by corcutt at May 1, 2005 04:00 PM
Comments
I can see your point (no pun intended) about going low-tech. I can even appreciate that the pencil has a certain feel and sound when you write with it that can be rather soothing. But I must differ with you. The nicest type of pencil with which to write is definitely a mechanical pencil. Somewhere between pen and pencil in it's marking and never needing sharpening, it really is ideal. Plus, there's a lot less waste produced (who is getting hold of those tiny razor blades in the sharpeners you throw away after you do so??). Additionally, you don't feel as though you should be marking one of choices A through E on your Scan-Tron form.
Posted by: Binkster at May 11, 2005 12:15 AM