Deviation Actions
Literature Text
Have you ever noticed that, when you write with a pen, you form the shape of your idea with each letter? It feels like you’re actually creating something raw and physical, a much better feeling than changing the color of a few pixels with the push of a button. And that change never lasts—it’s only temporary until you decide to look at something else. Where do your words go once you’ve closed the screen? You can’t touch them or feel them or carry them with you wherever you go. How can you even know they’re real?
Can you smell them? Or thrown them away? Or feel the ink leaving your pen and bonding with paper like blood flowing from your veins? Can you store them on a shelf, neatly chronicled in the notebooks of their birth? Can you read them a year from now and remember the emotion behind each word because of the welts left from your angry, heavy hand? Or see the fading ink color and remember with affection or regret that particular combination? Can you recall the feeling, the personality of it that fueled your creativity, if only for a moment?
Can you doodle on the pages? Or write in the margins? Or tap the page with your pen while you stare into space searching your mind for the next word or the perfect metaphor? Or will you simply open a new tab the moment your mind wonders, beginning yet another search of futility? Will you remember that search when you go back and read your digital works? Will you remember the comic that made you smile or the video that stirred your thoughts? Or will you only remember the lost time, the time you should’ve spent pressing buttons and turning pixels to words that remain hidden behind your internet browser … did that cat really just scale a wall?
this is pretty. ^_^
I just write with pencil or on the computer, though. I've never really liked pens... Too permanent, too hard to control... I've bought a little dip pen set thing awhile ago, though, but I don't think I'm very good with it. ...and it runs out of ink way too quickly. ...Sakura micron pens also seem to run out of ink too quickly (though not as quick as the dip pen), but I think they're kind of nice. Ball point pens don't always write, and erasable pens look like watercolor (and won't erase when a bunch comes out at once). I've also thought about brush pens, but I haven't experimented enough with those (mostly because they're so hard to find, I'm afraid of using up the ones I have found). Of course, I usually think about pens in relation to drawing. And I've always been best with pencil for that, too.
But as far as pencil and paper vs typing goes, I guess I do both. I suppose it depends on my mood and where I am. There does seem to be something a little more special about paper and pencil, though. Sometimes at night when I'm laying in bed with nothing to do, I'll get an idea and write it down on paper, and sometimes when I feel something's not working when trying to write something on the computer, I might go to my room and play around on paper, and/or revise stuff on paper. But sometimes it seems hard to write on paper, like when starting to write a chapter. It's too hard to move things around, so I don't get very far trying to do first drafts on paper. So it's like, when I think of ideas, I'll write them on paper (or on the computer if I'm at the computer), then when starting a first draft of a chapter it's best to do it on the computer where I can rearrange things or reword things easily (though I do try doing it on paper every so often), and then I might re-read and revise it on paper or the computer, depending on which I feel like at the time (a lot of times I'll do it both ways. It seems like I find something different when looking at it on paper vs when looking at it on the computer).