Hello world out there world!!

I saw this picture a while back and couldn’t help but think, “Thank goodness for computers.”

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With the amount of time I spend writing and rewriting my drafts my room would resemble… nay my house would resemble this picture. Just imagine not having a computer for a moment. As a writer we do not fathom how much paper we would have gone through between our first draft to our last draft with the commonness of computers now-a-days. Some of us still use notebooks but those are organized pieces of paper that can easily be filed away on a shelf or in a drawer. Yes they do take up space but not as much as crumpled pieces like this picture. Imagine every mistake you make and every piece you rewrite only to crumple it and leave it on the floor. Within a couple of hours your room would be filled to the ceiling; you wouldn’t be able to open the door, and a candle would be a death sentence…

We write so much with this technology that permits us unlimited space.

For example: look at your picture file on your computer for a moment. There are hundreds of images both those you’ve taken and those you’ve copied from online sources. If you were to print all of these pictures you would likely run out of wall space before you were halfway finished. On a computer we can store all these images without taking up physical space that wouldn’t have been realistic if we were to make them a physical copy.

Now, consider how many pages you’ve written… even the blog posts you’ve posted. Each page doesn’t take up physical space but if printed how much room do you think it would take up. With my books averaging around 250 pages and I do at least three drafts for each, I know I would run out of room quickly.

You don’t really think about your writing taking up physical space now that you have a computer that keeps in hidden behind zeros and ones. All we need to worry about now is our hard drive running out of room or our keyboard breaking from overuse, (which recently happened to me). Those of course can be fixed or improved. You can add more drives to your computer that sits in the corner of a room taking up very little space. You can buy yourself a new keyboard, maybe one that is graded for hard use like a ducky or alien. At the end of the day we sit here in front of this device that grows in kilobytes whenever we use it. Those books that used to take up the bookshelves in our living room now fit on a device that hardly takes up a corner of a kitchen table. We can read hundreds of books that we couldn’t imagine dragging around in a backpack now on our phones through applications designed to keep your life as organized as possible.

Thank goodness for computers… as my house would be a fire hazard on the daily without it.

But, at the same time I feel like that chaos caused by my paper rewrites and my walls plastered with hardcover books is something a writer or reader enjoy. With the amount of crumpled paper around your feet keeping you stuck to your desk shows that there is progress. Those hardcover books lining the shelves gives you a sense of wonder that each text was someones creation that you can hold in your hands and examine. Sometimes I like the physical messes writing causes. It gives you a sense that the written word can invade your life and take over your living space. It reminds you that its there… unlike on a computer where you can lose a document and forget about it. With a physical book or physical copy of your writing you’ll happen across it eventually when cleaning or reorganizing your work space. The same doesn’t always happen with your digital version.

I am thankful for computers as it has helped me stay organized but I do love the physical chaos paper can bring to a work space.