Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Writing Online Comes Very Easy To Me

Writing online seems to come very easy to me.

There's just something about the immediateness of it, I guess. And the cleanness of it as well. It's very clean. You're looking at a screen, you type, the letters and words line up in a beautiful way. If you make a mistake you just backspace. It even flags your errors. It used to be such a mess trying to write stuff on a typewriter. Or scribbling it out by hand with a pen or pencil.

That's what I can't believe about the great writers of old. That they could sit there day in, day out, with a fountain pen or a big feather and write out their manuscripts in long hand. I prefer pushing buttons. I like keyboards.

I remember one of the first computer keyboards I ever saw, maybe the first. The guy didn't have a computer or any prospects of getting one, but he had a keyboard. This was way back. He might've had the keyboard as part of a synthesizer or something, but it looked like a computer keyboard.* I was fascinated by that thing, thinking, If only... You know? I went into a dream.

I see the whole online experience as a mind freeing thing. The cleanness, as mentioned. And the immediacy. It's right there. You push a button and it's on, it's gone, it's there.

I definitely recommend it to other up and coming writers. Take it from me -- I can't string together five spoken words in polite company. But when it comes to writing online, there are very few who can beat me. I'm still always right up there, at the top of the game. And that's the way it's going to stay!

*UPDATE - I've been thinking about this guy's keyboard. And now that I'm getting it all recalled -- this was back in the '70s -- it was indeed a synthesizer, piano-type keyboard, not a computer/typing keyboard. He had no prospects, very little hope of actually getting a synthesizer made, but he did have a bare keyboard that was of no actual use. But this was back before these things were a dime a dozen, so it was fascinating to me at the time to see it. It sparked many fantasies of the brave new world out there on the horizon. Knowing now how "the future" worked out, I wonder now why it seemed so great.

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