When I say I want to talk about "writing with a computer," I mean I want to talk about what writing with — on — a computer affords. Specifically what it can provide as a tool over and above, say, a pen (or a typewriter, if you’re into that kind of thing). I want to talk about it because the way that I use a computer as a tool in my writing process seems very different from the ways in which most of my writer friends do, and (naturally) I think the way that I do it is — perhaps not better — but makes a greater use of the unique things that this particular tool, this "technology," makes possible.

By "technology" I mean "technology" in the sense that the wheel is a technology, the kind of thing that we understand at first — and sometimes forever thereafter — through metaphor. And the computer is riddled with metaphors to the analogue: directories, folders, windows, and so on, including, of course, the "page" inside your word processor application. While these applications obviously do a lot more than even the nicest electric typewriters, they still hold dearly to the metaphor of the page-as-sheet-of-paper, even though a very large proportion of writing ends up instead on the (still very much metaphoric) pages of the Internet. And there is nothing wrong of course, with metaphors, or this metaphor. But I believe there is possibility in what lies beyond this simple metaphor, and that is what I mean to talk about.

Regardless of where the writing ends up — a physical book or codex, a website, an app, an ebook, whatever — if it begins life on a computer, it begins as text, i.e., characters that are encoded into the 1s and 0s that the computer understands and processes. They do not live "on the page," but rather (and I am painting with a broad brush here; there are obviously exceptions) as text-based file-data that is presented to you on the screen via your editing or viewing application, and then converted, when the time comes, into some other presentation format to then be read. The text doesn’t exist "on a page" of a document (with the exception of in InDesign; but let’s leave that off for now, as one ought never compose directly into InDesign anyway); it exists alongside all the data around it.

So: why maintain the metaphor of the page?

There are good reasons not to give it up, of course. There are page-counts, either for yourself or some publisher, to keep in mind. There can be a feeling of accomplishment, or beauty, or at least progress in seeing the work typed out, indeed laid out nicely, on the page. The familiar metaphor removes a layer of translation or transformation that may or may not get in the way of the work.

Of course, I think that more can be gained by letting it go. By thinking of the text as such, as opposed to part of a pre-existing, pre-formatted document, we can free ourselves from the constraints that a page, a "document" implies; we gain easier access to the various transformations commonly performed on text; we gain access to tools designed specifically for text (as opposed to documents), and generally we create a new possibility for getting closer to the words, clauses, sentences, and other constructions themselves, such that the work, the art, the text as an object to be read.

There are fringe benefits to working on a computer as well — speed and accuracy (though these are arguable), easier portability (both physical and metaphorical), ease of duplication, dissemination, and version control, to name a few — but it is this mental shift, I think, that I am most interested in. Away from the boundaries enforced by any real or digital page, from a choice of a multiplicity of fonts and styles, and instead from a simple text editor, I think it is easier to get closer to the work, and to the words themselves.

As such, though I’ve previously outlined a prior version of the tools and processes I use today (and oh, the style of three years prior), I mean to revisit the tooling again, but with more of an eye to what that tooling — and that process — makes possible.