The medium and the message

I've said it before, and I'll say it again.

There is something about the tactile qualities of paper and ink and glue that can never be replaced by their electronic counterparts.

As a reader, I like to feel the weight and texture of books in my hands. I also tend to remember how to find bits and pieces of text by where they were positioned: about a third of the thickness in, on the left hand page near the top of the second paragraph.

As a compulsive writer, I use a word processor for larger projects (after all, it makes editing a dream) but I also have an array of notebooks and scraps of paper on which I jot down lines of inspiration and frustration as they come to mind. I have never really kept a diary (and oh! how it makes me feel like a failed writer!) but if you could bring together all the scraps of paper, the margins and the forgotten notebook pages on which I've scrawled thoughts as they came, you would have a diary of sorts. When I have new ideas for a narrative, I tend to write these by hand initially, then go on to word process. Typing these things out would never do.

Typing poetry would never do, either. Poetry, by nature, needs space to breathe. The mind has no time to breathe when word processing. Besides, once I'm finished, I like to see what the shapes of my letters tell me about my own frame of mind.

Sadly, I hear handwriting is on the decline. I can't help feeling that a certain type of insipiration is declining with it.

Umberto Eco discusses the problem here.