Paper Vs Technology

As a teenager, I have grown up with all these technological advances, as will many of you, I assume. My house has never not had a computer while I've been around and my phone is attached but I am still fascinated by the paper versus technology debate. I generally find that it is the older writers who stick to paper and the younger, more technologically advanced who are advocates for the computer as a writing tool.

I use both. As a child, I always used pen and paper because I wasn't that sure on how to use a computer but as I grew older, I became addicted to using a laptop or computer to note my thoughts. Of course, that was until the great disaster of 2010. My beloved laptop, where I stored everything including my most recent project which was sitting at 20,000 words, decided to devour 8,000 words. I think I may have cried. And shouted. And sworn, a lot. Luckily, because of my past with pens and paper, I had a fair amount of it scribbled down in various notebooks, along with copious notes. Still, it was pretty devastating. I stayed up all night, copying out the bits and pieces I had while racking my brains for the missing parts of the puzzle.

I never did get it all back. The file with the original copy had magically become encrypted by some evil computer powers, even the back-up on my memory stick was dead as a doornail. When I read it back a while later, I realised that some parts didn't make sense because the linking scenes, or scenes of origin, were gone forever and my memory isn't great at the best of times.

However careful I try to be with computers and technology, tip-toeing around them so they don't eat my work, I still have slip ups. I'm constantly closing my millions of tabs or deleting bookmarks by mistake, or perhaps not noticing the computer's low battery until I've written 2,000 words with no save and it dies. It took far too many occurrences of me deleting blog posts and rewrite the entire things, only to find out that they were automatically saved!

I may be sounding much older than fifteen with this rant but I think it's a valid point: not only should you back up your work but try to have fairly recent paper copies too. It's not worth the heartbreak after all!
That is why for my most recent book, I have written it all in a notebook. (Although it's also because I just love a good notebook, but that's beside the point.)







Do you prefer paper or computer? - comment below!

Lydia