Chained to the keys

I recently had to write the final section of a book. It wasn’t very long — 500 words or so, about half the length of this article — and an imminent train journey seemed the ideal opportunity. No laptop accompanying me, but that didn’t matter: as an exercise in nostalgia I would write the words in longhand. The words, however, refused to appear. The paper stayed defiantly blank. It dawned on me that I can no longer write except on computer.

Virtually every writer I know, or know of, is the same. As so often, technology has first liberated and then enslaved. Fetishisation of the writing process is nothing new — in previous eras inspiration would depend on a particular typewriter, or a certain fountain pen on a certain grade of paper. But both those forms implied a permanence once words had been written. What the computer has introduced is a total ease of rewriting.