Easy Gardening

It seems only a few short years ago, that I learned to write with a pencil. The teachers at the time made us keep the pencil sharp and we quickly learned to hide the shavings in our voluminous pencil cases. We used pencils because the ballpoint pens of our day leaked terribly across the pages. I can well remember my grade 6, 7, 8 teacher who had a fetish about clean pages. Being left-handed, I automatically smudged anything I touched with pen and pencil and routinely had pages ripped out of my notebook to be rewritten during recess.

Grade 9 saw me learn to type and it was recommended because I was “obviously” (according to the teachers) going on to University that I learned this specific skill. One semester later, I was typing at 40 to 50 words a minute, creating clean pages and could put the words down faster than I could by hand. This served me well during university days when the profs decided they wanted only typewritten work and friends were hammering out long papers one-finger at a time.

My first magazine and newspaper articles were bashed out on an old Underwood, and I entered the world of writing at 50 words per minute. It seems to me however, that there was a change in the way I thought between taking the time to hand write every word and being able to hammer out the words several times faster. I had to think faster, I could go back and correct my work but this was time-consuming. I found myself thinking in paragraphs rather than words or rather than sentences.

In the mid-1980s, I purchased my first computer. It was a Macintosh–2 clone with a Z-80 card and running CPM. With the massive 40 K of memory and 7.5 inch floppy disks, I was at the height of technology. Not only could I type out full articles and newspaper columns, but again, I noticed a change in thinking when I was writing. The speed of the machine demanded that I increase my speed of work and the way that I thought. Interacting with the machine put several barriers between myself the words and the activities those words represented. My words per minute count rocketed.

Over the past 20 years, I have upgraded computers and software. Each step along this pathway changes the nature of my writing and the way that I think.

This article is being dictated to a software program that translates the words to speech on a page. I no longer think in words, I no longer think in sentences, and my brain now has to learn a new way of thinking in paragraphs and indeed even pages. The machine can obviously type faster than I can, and after a fairly brief period of learning, it can keep up to my spoken word. The technology has caught up to my brain. It is removing the intermediate steps between my brain and the experience of the words on the printed page. I no longer have to slow down my thinking and use a mechanical system of sharpening pencils and laboriously working word by word through an entire thought.

As a writer, this machine interface brings my words closer to my thoughts but it forces me to work faster and to work conceptually. I no longer see the words taking shape on the page I no longer see and feel the rhythm of the words, instead I am training myself to communicate directly to the machine and my inner world. It is indeed an interesting transition in writing. From thinking about each word to thinking in conceptual thought and then to words. The end point is the same – words. But the way I get to those words is as different as it can now be.

The only reason I write this is as a marker, a placeholder in the development of a writer. It becomes a challenge to rethink writing, to rethink the way I talk and communicate new phrases and concepts and indeed the very nature of what it is I’m trying to do with my readers. it is not entirely clear who is training who, and am I in charge of this process or is indeed, the machine in charge. The challenge will be to control the machine to control the words the way they hit the page, to embrace the change and make it work for me as a writer.

The technology adventure continues!

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