Write Now
blogI am writing these words on my new laptop, an excessively cheap Fujitsu-Siemens that I will doubtless have cause to regret buying. Indeed, I have regretted buying it on numerous occasions. Fortunately, all of those regrets can be seen in a positive light when you skew your perception slightly. Because the reason I bought the laptop in the first place was because I wanted to start writing again and OS X is just too dashed distracting. There is too much going on in a Mac, it is too pretty, the functionality keeps seducing me into making silly movies, designing websites or playing with my GTD system. And, despite claims to contrary, Vista is still a piece of shit.
A piece of shit: that is the kind of phrase that could only be used by someone who spends too long checking websites like digg. It didn’t used to be this way. Back in the day (another terrible cliche) I used to love writing and found language superbly challenging, full of pliant phrases, subtle variations and the ability to encapsulate experience. When did I become undone by this gimcrack prattle?
Perhaps it was when Jamie parodied my style on the Neil Scout blog. For all the pleasures of that blog, it was unsettling to see oneself depicted as such an ass. Four years before that blog my friend Ralph wrote a roman á clef short story with me as a Shakespeare-spouting pseud with a tendency to make asinine statements. It didn’t bother me then. I was proud of my self-invention as a literrateur. Devoting myself to books was a way of overcoming the inadequacies of the present by attaching oneself to the glories of eternity. I adored the way that writers were scorned by contemporaries, with their genius being discovered only once the ideological blinkers had been removed. Perhaps, I thought, one day . . .
In my light spacious room on Murray Road, I wrote short stories on a battered old computer. The computer I got for £300 after asking the chap in the shop for a computer that worked and had Microsoft Word on it. And that was exactly what I got, a computer with no distractions on it: no games (bar Hearts, Solitaire and Minesweeper), no internet, no graphics program, no music player, nothing at all, really.
The first problems with writing came once I upgraded to a crappy yet expensive Time computer. What a fool I was, tempted to part with my money because of an ad campaign with Leonard Nimoy! But the end of my writing career – such as it was – came when Laura cascaded down to me her old iBook and I discovered how amazing Macs were. Almost overnight I became someone fascinated by visual culture, taking an interest in contemporary design and typography, spending more time on the design for the Mind’s Construction than I ever did on the writing.
When the iBook died, I invested in an iMac, a sleek powerful thing that makes designing websites a pleasure. I carried on writing, kind of, but developed an easy, conversational style that required no revision. Writing stopped being hard or challenging — which I thought a good thing — but it also stopped being pleasurable. Doesn’t the best writing always go beyond speech? Don’t we think in more than words?
And so, I decided that I was going to get a laptop that would allow me to focus entirely on what I was writing. It would have to be a PC, unsexy and functional. It would also have to be cheap, disposable, something I wouldn’t feel precious about. Something that I could take anywhere without constantly looking over my shoulder. I tried ebay but always lost, but this one was almost as cheap.
At first I treated my new Notebook like my PC at work and installed all my essential software, plus a load of open source stuff that I have vague a intention to learn (The Gimp, Inkscape, Scribus), but I have come to use just the one program: Darkroom, a PC clone of Writeroom on the Mac. It is so comforting to have zero distraction, with the added bonus that I can upload some of it — like this — to the internet.
Now I can write.