My writing on paper looks like web pages.

I write regularly in bound quadrille notebooks. If you were to look at these notebooks over time, you'd see that the layout and visual style in them reflects pretty closely my use of online tools and software for writing. Even though the page has infinite possibilities, I only see the layouts already framed by tools I'm used to.

It's almost as though I start to internalize the tools that I work with a lot (right now: Typepad, Pine email, the Socialtext Workspace wiki) and map my personal writing structure on top of it, rather than having an independent composition style that is sustained of my own that is sustained over long periods of use. When I used to use Confer a lot, I wrote a paragraph or two at a time, only, because that was what fit. Usenet was pretty much the same way. Email lends itself to hastily scribbled replies because there's just so much mail, and IRC writing dispenses even with sentences and punctuation. At one point I wrote in outlines, only - that was weird and hard to follow.

To keep my writing on paper fresh, I am always drawn to new online and software tools. My writing habits are not that of having an old 1940s typewriter that I can't write without - rather always being drawn to the shiny new word slicer. When I first saw Dan Bricklin's Trellix I suddenly started to write in two columns on paper, not just one - page layout, what a concept.

What I will find frustrating over time is when the writing degenerates into long, single spaced scribbled lists, a relic of too many years of batting ideas and tasks back and forth in electronic mail. When email domainates, my world quickly fragments; there's too many competing ideas all on the same screen to make any sense of them. (IRC is worse.)

I've always liked the five paragraph essay as a composition form. It fits neatly on a handwritten page, it's long enough to make more than one point, and it bears some effort and attention to get right. If I'm looking for a good world to write in, a writing environment that accomodates the one page essay is just about right.

Comments

[Murph]

I've found, relatedly, that the more time I spend using weblogs and wikis, the harder it is for me to force a piece of writing into a single linear chunk.

I'm too used to having a given idea follow from four ideas, and in turn be followed by four more, with the followed ideas and the following ideas likely being overlapping sets.

[Edward Vielmetti]

Now that my writing materials have changed, my page layout has changed with it - http://vielmetti.typepad.com/vacuum/2005/01/moleskine_vs_la.html

[Edward Vielmetti]

Another format change - http://vielmetti.typepad.com/vacuum/2005/01/cornell_notes_s.html - this was not hard to pull off, and reflects some time spent away from the screen where I might really get 15 minutes uninterrupted time to fill a page.