Look On My Works Ye Mighty
I’m a writer who’s obsessed with his own statistics as proof of his existence. This dates back to long before I started writing, in fact; I have every book I’ve ever read, for example—every single book—because the sight of all of those physical spines on a bookshelf is evidence that I am here. I have every baseball card I ever bought for the same reason, and also because of the mystical relationship between baseball stats and my own personal existential scorecard. Barry Bonds may have hit 73 home runs in 2001, but I read 37 books that year, and wrote 12 short stories and 2 novels1.
Over drinks recently a fellow writer told me they still print out hardcopy of their work each and every night2. Whatever they’d managed to write that day, they printed. They had stacks and stacks of paper everywhere, monuments to their work. I experienced a pang of regret, because my desire for those same kinds of monuments has run straight into my desire to live in the future, because like a lot of people, I’m running a 100% paperless writing career right now3.
But I miss the paper.
Stacks and Stacks
I held out for a long time. Until some time in 2005, I wrote all my fiction on a 1950s manual typewriter I stole from my sainted mother. Every story, novel, and failed experiment was tapped out on that old machine, resulting in a new stack of tidy white paper to add to the existing stacks crowding my apartments4. Moving house was a logistical nightmare thanks to the books and the manuscripts, and I quickly ran out of friends willing to show up for a slice of pizza and a beer5. That was okay, because all that physical paper reminded me that I was there. I had done things. Those ideas and stories weren’t just my imagination, I’d made them real.
It’s different today. Are the new ideas real? I don’t know. I have an obsessive spreadsheet where I keep track of finished works, and the numbers are comforting6. But it’s not the same. First of all, unfinished works have their own charms to the writer7, and they are invisible to the spreadsheet. And all those ones and zeros—no matter how many clouds you back them up to—exist only because civilization exists, because of the power grid and the technological infrastructure. When the world ends, and it inevitably will, when everything shuts off, in a split second everything I’ve ever created will more or less vanish until some super-evolved species of ant rises up from the radioactive slush and re-invents computer forensics.
In so many ways, the modern writing career is an improvement. Research is a matter of a few clicks. Submissions don’t require a trip to the post office8. Social media allows me to pretend to be much, much more successful than I actually am. And, yes, I can now move my entire life’s work to a new house by sticking a thumb drive into my pocket as I leave9.
But I miss them, the stacks of paper. Because if the health department isn’t called to my Collyer Brother-like mansion because I have died after being trapped for weeks beneath a collapsed pile of ancient manuscripts, did I even actually exist10??