There’s something about paper.
I’m not sure what it is, despite the fact that I’ve been thinking about this for many years.
Paper does things that computer monitors do not do.
Working on a little writing project, I got stuck.
To be precise, I was stuck on page 62.
There are many reasons for this stuckage.
The longer it gets, the harder it is to hold everything in my head at once. Where I’ve been. Where I am. And where I want to go.
I’m not much of a sprinter. But neither am I a long distance guy. I guess, as a writer, I’m more of a mid to short distance walker.
Thanks to a few recent developments in our family business, I have a little room to breathe in my life. Not a lot, but some. So I wanted to take the whole day off work and spend yesterday afternoon working on my writing project.
Instead of sitting at the computer, I printed a hard copy and I used the outdoor furniture at a nearby coffee shop.
It was a beautiful day. What a breath of fresh air.
I made a ton of edits in the first 62 pages — and all the scribble made me feel like I had gotten a serious amount of work done.
I also wrote a little, and scribbled lots of notes.
It’s the scribble itself that works so well.
The same amount of work on a word processor might not have felt like much. The computer doesn’t show the corrections. With the scribble (dark black ink all over the paper), it looks like I got A LOT DONE!
Now I’ve made lots of changes and am well into page 67.
Paper. I guess sticks and dirt were the original word processor — but paper is a pretty good one. There’s something about it.