Article by Phoenix writer Victoria Vasker ’26:
There is something beautiful about a blank sheet of paper— something that awakes the mystery and excitement inside a person born to be a writer until the depths of his soul are stirred and he picks up the pen. The potential, the emptiness waiting to be filled, the lines begging for a pencil to make contact, all cry out with the promise of what could be— and who has never been intrigued by the unknown?
My pencil flies across the page, scribbling, scratching, creating worlds and dreams and
stories. I am lost to another realm, oblivious to everything but the words forming on the paper before me. The room is silent. The only sounds are the sharp sssht, sssht, of my hand moving along the paper and the furious scratching of my pencil as I lean over my desk. Soon my paper becomes crinkly and in some places torn from erasing too hard. My pencil tip becomes small and stubbly. My handwriting is progressively worse. Papers amass on my desk in scattered heaps until there is no room to write, so I distractedly relocate myself to the floor and continue from there. I’m sprawled uncomfortably over my page, but I don’t even notice. I am in bliss.
Sometimes, I open a little drawer in my closet where I keep bits and pieces of my old works: fragments of stories, a poem verse here and there, perhaps an essay or the beginning chapters of a book. I love looking through this jumble— not so much for the meaning of the words but the way that they were written. Here my sentences are light; hardly discernible, but here they are dark, bold, crying for attention. I can feel the emotion of the stories I wrote so many years ago before I can even read them. That dog-eared, faded little notebook still speaks of how devotedly I used to carry it around during my middle-school years— always waiting for fresh ideas!— and a peanut butter stain near the top of one of my poems brings me right back to myself at age nine, sharing my rhymes with my family at the table. The memories that rise from those old sheets of loose leaf speak out clearer than the words written on them.
Somehow, try as I might, I cannot find that clarity in the blinking cursor on a computer screen. A computer is remote, unfriendly, aloof. The letters always come out exactly alike and the words seem distant and superficial. They can be created in minutes and erased in a second. A computer will treat the paragraphs of a business contract and those of someone’s deepest, innermost revelations exactly the same— filing them, placing them into folders, computing the storage and memory to cumulate in a series of zeroes and ones on a screen.
Technology is so easily accessible nowadays, but is it just me who feels writing has never been more distant? The page I see before me; it is a piece of me: I ripped it out of the notebook, I sharpened the pencil, I formed the words in my own handwriting. But the letters on a computer surely can’t be mine. They belong, at most, to the Google account that bears my name but could never be me, to the username and password I have to enter to gain access to what should be mine! I can write my name at the top of an essay, but that’s all that it will be: a name. The Times New Roman, size 12 double-space font is the same to me as it appears to everyone else, and it will always be that way.
I begin typing, and I stop involuntarily- everything is so vastly convenient that it seems unreal. “Must there not be some striving, some energy expended into the great gift God has given me other than pressing the “ON” button and moving my fingers along a keyboard? This new ease in writing and creating has ruined us instead of helped us. How often I find myself angry and impatient that a page will not load, that the keys are sticky, that Google has been of no avail in my search for just the right synonym— and then I think, At whom am I really getting angry? For a computer was and always will be impersonal, cold and indifferent. A computer snatches the life from a life-giving talent, processes it, and delivers it back in a neat little package, Times New Roman, size 12 double-space. A number on a screen. Black on white, and nothing more.
But what do I know?
