The pen is mightier....

I have decided to relent.

After the last few years of bashing away at the computer I’ve decided that picking up pen and paper and scribbling away in my hard to read handwriting is more productive than sitting at the keyboard and hammering away at the digits.

I’ve gone back to writing my writing down by actually writing!

When I first started writing I did so at work. Being in the ambulance service, the wee small hours were then a bit slow for calls, and I hated being woken up and having to rapidly get my brain into gear before careering off down the road to deal with whatever some person decided to do with themselves at that ungodly hour, that I always stayed awake whilst my crew-mate counted the z’s in the next room. I had to write on bits of paper, loose-leaf and stuffed into a battered and ripped A4 beige folder. I used to hide away in the ciggie room in my comfy battered chair and scribble away, making regular forays out to the kitchen for endless cups of tea to sustain me during those strange dark hours.

Technology has its good points, but you can’t beat the good old-fashioned technology.

I reckon people can lose sight of how it feels to actually write down, properly, the prose whizzing around in the mind. I find the flow is easier and more tangible and you don’t highlight and cut with pen and paper, you just write down what you’re thinking, warts and all. There’s a connection that you don’t get with a computer and it’s a bloody sight easier to just pick up a pen and add a line when it suddenly occurs to you.

It’s less of a distraction too. With a computer you’re just a click away from everything, and I mean everything. It’s all too easy to wander off and then find that for the last hour you’ve been scrolling through e-bay or looking at the house you’re going to buy when your latest book hits the best-seller list; the book that you’re not writing because you’re looking at the internet!

Give me a nice fountain pen and a few bits of paper and I’m happy as the pig in the proverbial.

I reckon that’s not a bad thing either!