Recently, I printed out around two dozen manuscripts of my short fiction and non-fiction. I’m also in the process of printing out my blog posts and the diaries I kept on a Google Doc early during the pandemic.
I’m not doing this to put together a book and submit it to a publisher. Instead, I’m creating a physical archive of my writing, because I don’t want to lose my (good) work. This might seem contradictory, because isn’t that the point of cloud services like Google Drive or Dropbox—-that you can access your stuff from anywhere?
The fragility of digital infrastructure
As reliable as the internet might feel, stuff that exists online–-or on any digital infrastructure–-can disappear anytime. (I highly recommend reading this excellent piece by Adrienne LaFrance on how that can and has happened.) Digital infrastructure, at the end of the day, is still infrastructure, and therefore can be damaged. While I’ve personally not lost anything I’ve backed up so far due to device failure, I’ve read enough cases to know that my notebooks are more likely to survive the next couple of centuries than my Google Doc files.
How screen fatigue affected my writing
So I’m now printing out my manuscripts, but I’m not doing this just to preserve my work. Over the last few years, I’ve repeatedly let myself drown in screen fatigue, distracted by blog links and YouTube, scrolling instead of writing. Back then, I used to write on my laptop because I could write faster when I typed. But screen fatigue created an aversion in me. I read less because of the tiredness, and I wrote even less because of the aversion.
The influence of online reading and writing trends
When I did manage to sit down to write, my choice of topic, form, and structure was very heavily influenced by what everyone else was doing online. If everyone was starting a newsletter, I thought of doing so too. If they were writing personal essays about loneliness in one’s early 20s, then I thought I should do so too.
The hours I spent reading stuff online–-even good stuff published in magazines or on personal blogs-–far, far outnumbered the hours I spent with a physical book. My online reading shaped my ideas about what I should be writing about, where and how, which didn’t necessarily match the kind of writing Iwanted to do. Online trends pulled me towards themselves when I should have been making progress towards my preferred destination.
Staying in touch with my art
Along with printing my manuscripts, I also started writing by hand, meaning that overall, I spent very little time on my devices and a lot more time interacting with the real world, reading physical books, and resting. I don’t get distracted by links and I tend to be less verbose, more specific and direct. In addition, this paper trail, at the end of a writing session, also acts as a tangible proof of the work I’ve done. This process of sharpening a pencil and sitting down with a stack of blank, blue-ruled sheets has become a way of seeing my work before me and staying in touch with my art, quite literally.
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Printing my manuscripts also created other big benefits for me:
I edit more effectively
I can edit more effectively on paper—-the draft is easier on the eyes, I can add/remove stuff with a pencil in my hand, the changes still visible rather than completely gone. I can lay out the piece on the floor, the pages next to each other, and see the structure of my piece—-are all paragraphs too short or too long? Is there enough breathing space? Is there possible symmetry or braiding in my piece? How do the different sections come together? Is the opening too long compared to the rest of the story?
This sort of big-picture view is not visible when you’re scrolling through a document—-when you zoom out to see the structure, the words are too small to make out.
I am learning from my past self
I’m printing out all my drafts. Which means that I’m re-encountering stuff I’d written years ago and had forgotten about. Revisiting my stories showed me that my past work was rich, more varied than my current work! I was reminded of the kind of stuff I had the capability of writing—-the manuscripts were the proof–-and also of the inspiration behind those stories. I’d lost so much from my practice over the years that I’m now rediscovering–the discipline, the sources of ideas, the methods, all of which used to work, because back then I was focused on writing, rather than on what everyone else was doing!
Handwritten first drafts and digital second drafts
Ten years of writing mostly on the computer amounts to a lot of work. Although I’d deleted several bad and incomplete drafts over the years, there were still a lot of files that needed to be printed. And it wasn’t easy to resist editing them before printing them, which did increase my work somewhat.
Now, however, if I write something that I want to share with the world, I’ll only have to take my first, handwritten drafts and type them up into better, digital drafts. My work will not be dependent on the survival of some remote data centre and it’ll be my work, influenced by my experiences and my interests, rather than driven by an anxiety to be a part of the latest trend everyone’s participating in (not that that’s bad; it just wasn’t what I really wanted to do). I’m writing more already, and writing the stuff I’ve always wanted to write. It’s been a long time since I was this free and happy as a writer. And my growing physical archive, including both past and new work, is a testament to that joy.
Bio: Ratika Deshpande is a writer from India. Her work has appeared in Authors Publish, Reactor Magazine, the Brevity Blog, and other platforms.
