I've always enjoyed the physical act of writing. At four years old, I filled a notebook with a facsimile of cursive writing, a copy of what my older sisters were learning in school. Pages and pages were devoted to the same letter, because I'd nailed an e's elegant swoop and was diligently trying to recreate it. I failed. A few years later, I'd taken to typing up movie plots (mostly
Star Wars). The word processor I used had a gimmick where it replaced common nouns with little pictures, so there were a lot of hand emojis in front of the name 'Solo' since well that's what I thought his name was. At thirteen my parents bought a new computer and I would take off my headphones, turn off my music while I typed because I liked the clack clack of the keyboard. At fifteen an English teacher read my poem about Apollo to the class (D:), and my parents read my rewrite of a scene from The Outsiders I'd done for a class assignment. They (my parents) bought me a laptop so that I could write in my room, but it couldn't connect to the internet and I couldn't get the floppy drive to work so anything I wrote on it would've been trapped on it forever until it died, so I didn't use it to write much. I used it to play Solitaire and Hearts. My grade twelve English teacher singled me out as the one kid in class who could write a brilliant final exam essay without a brainstorm outline or structure. He claimed he was jealous because I had a chance to make a living as a writer. But my writing is always better if I plan it first. At twenty-two I relearned cursive and started writing my first drafts out by hand and I've never stopped, since it highlights the roughness of the rough draft, which lowers stress; it reduces facebook distraction; and it makes the typing part so quick and painlessish that I feel like a rockstar of the mind. At twenty-four I bought myself a Macbook Pro and boy do its keys sing.
