One must imagine what Dr. Jerry Pournelle, widely acknowledged as the first working writer to utilize a word processor, thought about the process of writing at the end of his life, in 2017. In the late-1970s, Pournelle noted that his computer was “saving him whole ‘months’ of typing and retyping, and that it let him produce prose at ‘double’ the rate” (p. 99). Yet, to the youngish citizen of 2020, some of the limitations Pournelle encountered during his pioneering endeavors seem comedic: the Apple II computer (released in 1977) could not produce lower-case letters, The Electric Pencil, the system Pournelle used, didn’t have the capabilities needed to boldface, underline, or italicize, and was prone to errors, which meant the danger of losing a document was always present (seeing as how autosave was a resident of the distant future).

In regard to my composition process, I disagree with science-fiction writer Frank Herbert claim that computers “amplify creative imagination.” Outside of academia, I am a working film critic and part-time poet. In crafting a film review, I utilize pen and paper to craft notes both at movie theatres and in the comfort of my bed. At times, films elicit reactions from me which result in notes more akin to pictograms than actual letters—I could never utilize a computer for this in the same way I do the notebook I keep in my back pocket. My drafting process also includes a lot of marginal work, such as arrows, variations of underlining (i.e., how many lines an underline contains to signify importance of content), highlighting, and dialogue bubbles (to keep the mood light). However, all that being said, I couldn’t envision a world in which the chaos of my notebook isn’t transposed onto a laptop running the latest version of Microsoft Word. The speed with which I am able to type what I’ve written equates to high-levels of productivity, and the countless features provided by the program, including numerous add-ons such as Grammerly, which functions as a “writing assistant,” make it seem as though we’re creative aristocrats compared to science-fictions writers in the 1970s.

May I never lose my notebook, for without it, I am nothing, and may I never lose my computer, the electric mirror without which my notebook remains an article of obscurity.