Nov 26 2008
A Writer’s Thanksgiving
In the spirit of Thanksgiving, which we’ll be celebrating tomorrow, I think it’s appropriate to mention a few things I’m thankful for as a writer. Here is a very incomplete list:
My personal computer. I started my freelance writing career before personal computers became available. I wrote articles by hand on rolls of butcher paper. Then I’d do the final writing with my IBM Selectric II typewriter – a machine heavy enough to have been used as the anchor for a luxury liner. When I started using my first personal computer (a clunker that didn’t even have a hard drive and cost over $4,000), I was able to do the same amount of writing in half the time, or produce twice the output in the same amount of time. I am not exaggerating.
The Internet. I spend a surprising amount of time on the Web. It has become the writer’s most accessible, powerful research tool for writers. I remember what research was like before the ascent of the World Wide Web. Even tiny tasks like checking the spelling of a place name would often require a trip to a library. Thank you, Al Gore, for inventing the Internet!
Moleskine notebooks and Pilot G2 extra fine gel pens. Heaven help me, but I love these little black books and pens. They provide the perfect foil to the uber-technological lifestyles we writers face today. Having just said how thankful I am for my personal computer and the Internet, this may seem contradictory, but any writer will know what I mean.
Readers. If you tell a joke in an empty woods, is it a joke? If you write a story and no one reads it, is it a story? Those are, of course, silly questions, but the point is, I’m grateful to people who read what I write. And that includes you. Thanks.
Right-brain dominance. My father and brother are accountants. I’m a writer. Go figure. They are left-brained – great with facts and figures. I’m right-brained (or is it “write-brained”?) – definitely not a facts and figures guy, but better adapted to concepts and seeing relationships and connections between ideas and things. Without right-brain dominance I would not be a writer. And since I love being a writer, I’m thankful for the slightly swollen right side of my brain, which mercilessly bullies the left side.
And all that’s just the beginning.
What are you thankful for?
Loved this . A little humor makes life’s tragedies easier to cope with. I too had one of those new fangled puters before there was a windows program. I had a friend build it for $150.00. I still loved it and like you, I am grateful for the thing. I am most grateful for grammar check and spell check. I am not sure if I am right, left,or mush brained. Is there a difference? Mush is nice and squishy and absorbs data at an astounding rate. It is not my fault that the data fails to remain catagorized and I remember I saw a monkey driving a bus.Notebooks are great for claifying short circuited thoughts.
I love your site.
I really enjoyed your story about the Computers. I bought mine several years ago. It was quite big and quite expensive too. I remember the monitor was black and you could choose between yellow, amber and green letters.
I don’t remember the name of the operating program, but it had to do something with star and you had to learn lots of codes for the different operations.
And do you remember the floppy disk? The amount of information you could store was limited and here in Ecuador they were quite expensive.
Now you have pen drives with storage capacity of 8 gigas!