Step Away…from the Electronics!

Posted by john on | May 22, 2011 | 6 Comments |

I was talking with a good friend and fellow blogger and he was telling me how cool his new phone is because it does text to speech. This sounded like a fantastic idea because then a writer, journalist, or author could speak their whole story and never have to type again! But this also got me to thinking something else which I’d never considered: When it comes to writing, have we become too dependent on electronic devices? Within the last few weeks I got my answer.

Loss: What’s it worth?

The first instance of this was when my laptop hard drive crashed completely. Thankfully, I save all of my writing on an external hard drive so this was not a huge deal. I have a great friend who works in the Information Technology industry, and he was able to replace the drive within a day. All was great once again. At least, that’s what I thought.

Turns out my emails (all of them) had been backed up on the laptop hard drive and not the external one. To some, this may not sound like a big deal. Fact is, if you’re a writer today you most likely live via email. Correspondence with publishers, editors, printers, and not to mention submissions, are increasingly becoming part of the electronic world. We, or at least I, rarely if ever in the last four years have submitted a paper copy of an article or a story.

So essentially I had lost over a decades worth of emails and contacts which included submissions, critiques, and other such correspondences. After realizing this, I was devastated because I had never thought to track my submissions on say 3×5 cards or some other form of paper filing because…well, because I was lazy. I mean, what’s the worst that could happen? As we have seen hard drives crash, viruses get accidentally downloaded and so on.

Sure, I have an external hard drive, but what’s to say that won’t take a dive? No matter how well built a machine is, they wear out over time there’s no way to prevent this. We can maintain them but even then we are only preventing the inevitable for how long? So what are we to do?

Back-Up Now!

Back-up everything that is important. If you are like me and have been writing for a length of time you’ll quickly discover that your documents, pictures, and emails will quickly eat up many CD’s. I am okay with this myself. Others prefer to use what is now termed cloud computing which means you save your files in a remote location other than your hard drive and access them through the Internet.

I have heard many rave reviews about a few companies who offer this service and for the price can you really go wrong? That I will leave up to you. Personally, I don’t like the thought of my work being out there in someone else’s care. I’d rather be physically responsible for it.

The other question when doing back ups is how often. As for me, after my computer crashed, I began running back-ups of documents every week and complete drive back ups once a month as well as using Google docs for some of my less important documents which were not critical to me.

• Taxes
• Submission queries
• Any document tracking
• Drafts and finals

These should all all be backed up because if lost you will never be able to get that back once its gone.

Smartphones, PDA’s, and the Like

Fast forward a couple of weeks after my computer crashed and yeah, you guessed it, my BlackBerry device had what I later learned was a ‘critical hardware failure’ (something they are not known for, by the way). My friends and family can all attest to the fact that I live on my ‘Crackberry’ as they are affectionately known.

I use a BlackBerry, because it allows me to access the social networks where ever I might be, whether I am attending a writer’s conference, or maybe a reptile show like the one I will be at when you’re reading this post. These smartphones are awesome little devices with applications like Evernote, Google Docs, and many more applications that I use for everything from sales to scheduling.

One of the best things I like about smartphones is that when I meet someone with whom I want to connect, I can enter their business card with a few clicks and voila, they’re in my ‘little black book.’ I can even categorize them with tags, etc. so I know not only who they are but why they are important. Even WordPress has an application which allows me to blog right from my phone!

But back to the downside of any electronic device, the crash. This time, thankfully, I was a little smarter due to my experience with my laptop and had backed up the phone to the external hard drive. So, after two days of withdrawal from the social networks, text, and email, I got a new phone and within an hour I was up and running since I had backed up the information I had stored on my previous phone.

Ye Olde School

You might remember in my first Tough Love for Freelance Writers post, I mentioned my early beginnings which included notebooks and too many pens. I used to write everything and I do mean everything ‘longhand’ in notebooks and used Post-its like they were candy. After I acquired my laptop and smartphone and learned to use them well, it became easier and easier to use them rather than carry a notebook and pen everywhere. I still carried a notebook and pen wherever I went but they were a sort of back-up to the electronic devices. This should not be the case.

I have begun once again to write everything out long hand with pen and paper. I have become enamored with it too and here’s why, there’s just something that does it for me when sitting in quiet spot and hearing the micro-tip of my pen catch on the fibers of the paper. Another thing that is interesting to experience is the misspelling of words or even having to pick up a thesaurus or dictionary for a specific word. Instead of being auto corrected or pushing a couple of buttons I am now forced to learn more about the English language! Whoa! Now that’s an experience we can all use.

I see it all the time in blogs, short stories, etc. People (myself included) have gotten lazy in their writing over the years and the excuses are too numerous to count. So in order to protect yourself and maybe get an education while you’re at it, why not try your hand at writing long hand. This way, you can file it away or transcribe it to a digital document and if that’s ever lost you still have the original document itself.

When writing I always write from my heart. Losing that can be devastating. I would strike a sort of balance maybe writing shorter pieces by hand and then transcribing them. Write maybe an hour or so by hand then transcribing it to the computer. I would simply try to use both equally. Sometimes as this piece proves you have to compromise.

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