POINT OF VIEW
When the Pen Met the Blank Page: a Writer's Farewell to the 20th Century
By BONNIE J. MORRIS
As a writer as well as an academic (those identities are not the same), I watch the approach of the coming century with a kind of bubbling dread. For I am one of the belligerent Luddites still writing by hand with a Sheaffer fountain pen in my journal every night. That organic feel of nib on paper, ink on callused middle finger, spiral notebook flopped open on warm knees -- that intimacy of creation has been replaced, for most of my students and colleagues, with laptops and Microsoft. I know that "my" century has seen a complete restructuring of what it means to write.
Gone are the tenderly handwritten letters sending confidences to lovers or to parents; we use e-mail these days. Gone is the 10-year-old girl lying on her belly on a shag rug, writing stories: She's upright at her workstation, surfing the Internet, playing video games. Gone is the mobility known to Harriet the Spy -- the 11-year-old in the eponymous novel who writes her observations in a notebook during her daily "spy route" in Manhattan. A laptop, though increasingly lightweight, can't be jammed into a jeans pocket while one gathers shells beneath the beach pier. The spontaneity of journal keeping, the ability to stick an autumn leaf or a movie-ticket stub between marked pages, has been transformed by technology.
Like so many scholars of my generation (I'm in my late 30s), I was in my last year of graduate school when computers became common among all students. Not until I began writing my Ph.D. dissertation, in 1988, did I pitch my beloved typewriter and log on. As a writer, I easily adapted to WordPerfect. There's no question that computers are convenient: Whole paragraphs are moved tidily, errors are dispatched at a button's touch, work is printed out ab initio ad infinitum while one wanders out for coffee. WordPerfect's blue screen, blank before creation, resembled waiting journal pages -- empty until filled. I wrote and published four books in this way.
I had a hard time when WordPerfect was phased out on my campus ("no longer supported," in the newspeak of universities). I was forced to work with Microsoft Word: borders, prompts, whole tiers of the screen blinking their suggestions, monitoring my choices. I felt invaded.
Truly, I'm alone, it seems. My students, reared with mouse in hand, find blue-book tests archaic: Why not assign them take-home essays, readily perfected on computer? Why suffer through their handwriting, when laptop work would do? My students handle my alien fountain pen with interest, and are appalled that I don't put my journal entries on disks. Cleverly, they point out that I'll serve my future biographers well by leaving my life's memories "on file." This specter of posthumous editing, of some graduate student pawing through my journals, is a morbid thought indeed: Now even immortality requires Windows.
There's no turning back, I know. In this country, at any rate, handwriting (and typewriters) will belong to the 20th century; the 21st is crowded with icons, fonts, spell-check, files, and conveniences -- the student writer blessed, no doubt, yet hand-held, coaxed toward a dozen prompts and reminders. The technology has quadrupled the amount of time one sits before a screen. Is my wariness that of the hippie-raised child warned away from television's rays?
I acknowledge that I have been forced to make enormous and continual changes since the onset of my academic career, that I race to catch up as my students arrive each fall, more computer-literate and computer-dependent than the previous bunch. The disparity in our outlooks is as profound as the gap between any two generations. Yet, as most faculty members lament, our students' nicely printed-out pages hardly compensate for their increasingly abysmal writing skills. I wonder: Do young people in a generation tied to a machine for all things literary ever feel the urge to write outside, maybe leaning against a tree or looking out at the ocean? Considering the financial investment and risk of theft that a laptop represents, it cannot be casually abandoned under a tree in a public park -- like a spiral-bound notebook -- when the writer leaps up to join an impromptu Frisbee game.
Traveling around the world, I carry my journal with no fear of its theft, or of a dearth of battery packs. I plug it in directly to my mind, sketching or writing or taping in the minutiae of cultures. The greatest threats are fire and water and leaving it behind. And my notebook invites curiosity in ways a laptop doesn't: "What are you writing?" ask friends and strangers everywhere. I'll never forget the day outside the Cairo Museum, when I was suddenly surrounded by a busload of Egyptian schoolgirls, and I let every one of them sign her name -- in Arabic and English -- in my journal. Or the nights spent in a Jerusalem cafe, painstakingly learning Armenian writing from a witty chef.
Cross-cultural, human contact, made possible by this more-universal handprint of art and naming, is what I hope we will not lose -- as nation after industrialized nation eagerly follows the Western model of computerizing students.
The instinct of writing and creating off screen -- will that wane, in some techno-evolutionary mandate? Who would be to blame?
I hope to see a balance -- in 2000 and beyond -- between the tools of professional presentation and the lives we live as writers. A pen and journal still cost less than admission to a film. The habit of writing, which best prepares young students, should not hinge on the rooted verticality of a computer screen. Like Anne Frank, like Arctic explorers, we must be prepared to write our greatest testimonies in non-technical conditions, where and when we can.
Bonnie J. Morris is a visiting assistant professor of women's studies at George Washington University.
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Section: Opinion & Arts
Page: A72
