An empty book full of nothing.

[jackshoegazer]

For the great event of returning to school, I was gifted with a nice set of thin Moleskine notebooks and I'd yet to write anything in them - until now.  Last night, during the break in my psychology class, I wrote this:

i am of a new
generation
a new
species
who despise
writing
on paper
and its
permanence.

the sun drops behind the parking garage, illuminating the soft underbelly of the clouds and I wish I had a computer to organize my thoughts, edit and rearrange them into the perfect order, rhythm, arrangement because that's our job, isn't it, to take the seemingly chaotic world - the trees and streams and cows, the thoughts and feelings and wrongs, and compose them in some order so others will know we were here and did it better than God.

I also wrote a bit about the people in my class, but that's not finished yet.  Trying to write in a notebook made me realize how acclimated I am to writing on a computer.  I am used to being able to edit as I go, to have everything fluid until that last moment when I am satisfied and ready for my words to truly exist.  The enter button - a catalyst, crystallizing the world.  Imagine if you could do the same with your life - see the whole thing, edit it until you got it just right, and only when you were satisfied, hit the enter button and let it flow out into reality, go through the "formality of actually happening."

Comments

[schmecky.livejournal.com]

When I was back east, Dad and I talked about how he typed mom's thesis out on a typewriter, where you were not only allowed no typos, but no correction tape or fluid.

And how, in college, there was some form I had to fill out that had to be typed, but was not available in soft copy, so I wandered all over campus for over a week looking for a typewriter, and one by one, people in offices realized they hadn't seen one in years, and hadn't noticed.

I wonder if attention to detail, on a large social scale, has deteriorated, now that we don't have to worry about getting things right the first time.

[jackshoegazer.livejournal.com]

There is a typewriter exchange store down the street from us. I have no idea how they are still in business.

pass me the candle

[marie-paris.livejournal.com]

I'm a writer, former grammar tutor, former english major (heavens no), and have done a lot of editing/proofreading, and I loved this post.

I'm trying to get back to writing by hand lately and just mentioned to someone days ago how odd it is to me to hear famous authors I admire saying that they write everything by hand. I look at them in awe upon hearing that revelation.

I wasn't raised on computers. I'm in my late thirties and lived in the deep south when in school, where the state culture was behind the rest of the country, and never saw a computer lab, even in college. I've only been using a home pc for four years now, but I've written everything with it since, and now feel I can't do without it. So the off button is my new favourite, at least during this experiment in which I pretend it's the 80's and no matter how fast I'm thinking or how seductive the spell checker is, I'm not going to rely on the computer in order to express my inner literary yearnings!

[jackshoegazer.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

I didn't edit it as I typed it because I wanted to show its rough edges.

[crapjournal.livejournal.com]

I think there's an urgency in writing on physical paper which can't be ignored. I don't like the way that the computer forces you to second guess everything before it's even halfway done. The reason that well-known writers put everything down on paper first is because they understand the need for agency, in order to get the right amount of unquestioned pages sometimes you have to practice the flip and forget.

Writing on computers just leads to shorter sentences and ridiculously manicured passages. The rough life is excised before it has a chance to show promise, and the book turns into some kind of boring deep-think equation. A complicated literary puzzle. Not worth reading. Have fun with your moleskine!

[jackshoegazer.livejournal.com]

Oddly, when my friend John and I wrote our first novel, we wrote it entirely on the computer (260-something pages, 60 chapters in 60 days) and there was an urgency, a feverish energy to it that I was afraid it would lose if we edited it too much.

Often when I write, I have to just type as much as I can without really looking at it, otherwise I never get more than two sentences down.

I don't know about shorter sentences, as I tend to write long, meandering sentences whether on paper or computer. I often have trouble ending a sentence. (Which reminds me of a book I heard about that is several hundred pages but it is only one grammatically-correct sentence.)

[joraina.livejournal.com]

Ahhh, Moleskine; such inspiration can be derived from superiour writing materials.

[jackshoegazer.livejournal.com]

AH, that reminds me of the first thing I wrote in my first Moleskine...

12-30-6 first entry

this is a moleskine
and in it, a profundity
is supposed to appear
for genius has writ
in pages like this.
so my question is -
is it the paper
or the mind
or the mind on pulp
that drags out
the genius
the spark
the soul
or the drivel
you've just read.

#

[lagizma.livejournal.com]

I loooove my moleskine and got my sister Madeleine into it, too. I write everything there, from post ideas to brilliant inventions to records of customer service calls with my cell phone company to shopping lists to to-do lists.

[jackshoegazer.livejournal.com]

I try to keep mine to memories, observations, prose and poetry. I used to keep larger blank books that I kept thoughts, quotes and whatnot in, but I stopped writing in those when I stopped actively studying more esoteric subjects.

[---four.livejournal.com]

"...and compose them in some order so others will know we were here and did it better than God."

that is so beautiful.

[jackshoegazer.livejournal.com]

Thank you :)

I was trying to say that we try to take what "God" has given us, and improve upon it, but you know how poetic license works.