Paper Notes In A Digital World

What great advice it was when an old boss of mine told me years ago how important it was to write lots of handwritten notes; thank-you and congratulatory notes, birthday cards, or just a note to say hello. I invested in some small personal notecards from a stationer and have taken his advice for years. It only takes a minute and handwritten notes are appreciated, as so few are written anymore. I get great satisfaction from taking a few minutes and writing to friends and colleagues as those before us did – with pen and paper.

I have posted a picture of what one of my current notecards look like. (You can always click on any of my pictures to zoom-in.) You might laugh when I tell you where they came from. Cranes? William Arthur? No, far from it…these came from discount catalog supplier Walter Drake. A set of 50 folded notecards, sized 5 3/8 x 4 1/8″ are $7.99. 100% cotton? Archival quality? Well, no, but many people have complimented me on my, “nice stationery.” Honestly, I recommend these for those who want to give it a try before committing to nice (and expensive) notecards, like those from Crane & Co. I use these Drake cards on many occasions and find them satisfying for most all my needs.

It was great advice when it was given to me and I find it still can make a big impression. With the prices I just quoted above from the Drake catalog, expense really isn’t an issue. You can even get started with blank cards from the office supply store. I can guarantee you this, If you decide to take the plunge and drop a few notes, you’ll get a good feeling just from participating in an activity almost as old as the ages.

The holiday season brought a new set of DVDs to Levi Asher’s home. Not “Star Wars Episode III – Revenge of the Sith,” or “Million Dollar Baby,” or any other Hollywood blockbuster. Levi runs the Literary Kicks blog and is a voracious reader. So, for Levi, the DVD set was the Complete New Yorker. I must say I have been tempted with this, but reading The New Yorker on DVD seems, well, different. The set contains every issue from 1925-2005. Levi Asher wrote a nice piece at LitKicks.com and gives us his observations on this mammoth DVD set.

Digging in to a collection like this is not easy. I bet most people who buy this set or get it as a present just jump in and start breezing through, and then quickly find themselves gasping for air. That’s the wrong way to use a set like this, and I’m not going to make that mistake. I’m going to plan my expeditions carefully, working towards specific goals. I’ve got a few missions in mind, most of them focusing on the magazine’s first two decades …

This is a fun and interesting post from Levi and he tells us why really, the original New Yorker, was a…..ready for this?….a litblog(!) ahead of its time. I’m still not completely sold that I could enjoy The New Yorker on my computer screen, but he sure makes the content sound appetizing. Great read from LitKicks.com.

I ventured out on Thursday to buy my brand new laptop. I had waited for post-Christmas sales and sure enough, the one I wanted had dropped $100. Needless to say I am excited and feeling good to go pick this shiny new notebook up at the shiny new computer store. I get it home and the first thing is connectivity problems with the wireless network. Then it’s restarting after errors at boot. Then it’s a problem with Windows XP SP2 and a couple of my favorite programs. Sure enough, they report compatibility problems. Then it’s realizing that almost half (half!) of my hard drive is taken up by the manufacturers “recovery files.”

Ten deep breaths, Mike. Count to 100 before proceeding at each frustrating glitch and surprise. None of that works this time. I’ll try later, but by this time I was plenty angry and “calm,” was not a part of my vocabulary.

I start telling myself I could subscribe to daily delivery of The New York Times. I could get my info fix with subscriptions to Time, Newsweek, The Week, Sports Illustrated, The New Yorker, a few others – and throw the technology out the window! I could write Paper Notes In A Digital World from a public terminal at the library – or something easy like WebTV. Okay, I’m kidding about that part…but the library would work!

In all honesty, my Moleskine has never been more loved than it is tonight. No compatibility problems – ever. No patches for security threats. Half the notebook isn’t taken up by the manufacturer. I love my Moleskine. I hate my new laptop. For now. I’ll be fine though and make peace with the fact that new computers require a certain learning curve and adjustment period. I’m actually beginning to calm down tonight and come to terms with all of this. I accept that the “In A Digital World,” part of the name of this blog means I probably need to settle in and just figure it all out. But, for tonight (or actually late into the morning hours), I am reminded again why I love paper so much.

Here we go, one more time before bedtime, Mike, let’s try this again: ten deep breaths. One, two, three……..Oh! I didn’t tell you about the overheating! It started…….(deep breath)…four, five, six……..

A few years back Writers Digest Press was publishing a magazine called, Personal Journaling. It only lasted 14 issues, but fortunately WritersDigest.com has preserved some of the content on their website. Many of the articles dealt with practical journaling problems, such as how to keep journal entries private.

For many, it is a real hindrance to commit to journaling for fear that the journal will be discovered by a spouse, child, friend, or someone else who doesn’t have permission to read it, and that problems could come about through that discovery. This is usually a problem for those who keep introspective journals/diaries and think through a lot of difficult issues in their writings. It’s hard to feel you can write what you would really like to write if (fill-in-the-blank) might find the journal and read your entries.

Keeping a password-protected journal on a computer is one answer. But for many, writing these personal thoughts on a computer is just not the same. I use the computer for many things, but I simply cannot keep a journal on one. I like to make statements when I am journaling that can only be made with angrily scribbled entries with lots of capitalization and underlining; complete, of course, with several oversized exclamation points. It’s hard, (for me anyway), to pour out that kind of raw emotion on a computer. With that said, many people do it all the time and find they have no problems keeping their journals in the digital world. There are many good journaling software programs and I see their benefits of privacy, search capabilities, etc. But they’re not for me.

Personal Journaling magazine dealt with this topic in the June 21, 2001 issue of PJ in an article by Diane Weiner called, “Lock Up Your Private Writing.” It’s a fairly short article concerning journaling and privacy, and I would encourage you to read it if this has been a concern to you. For example, here’s Ms. Weiner on why you might need to hide your writing:

If someone has read your diary, or even rifled through your desk drawer looking for it, you can relate to my feelings of anger and betrayal. In an ideal world, we would all respect each other’s privacy and wouldn’t dare to read another’s diary, even if it were lying open on a table. However, human nature is curious, and so our private writings are vulnerable. This doesn’t mean we should abandon them, though. It just means we must become more determined — and creative — in our resolve to protect our diaries from prying eyes.

There are some good ideas in the PJ article. I hope that those who might be putting off journaling because of privacy concerns will read it, and hopefully reach a comfort level to where they can begin personal writing.

Writer’s Digest, by the way, heard from a lot of people when they canceled Personal Journaling and have replaced it with a magazine called, Personal Writing that covers journals, essays, memoirs and blogs. It is on a rather erratic schedule but seems to be coming out 3 or 4 times a year. Update July 2010: Now, “Personal Writing” is no longer being published.

If you have some ideas for notebook privacy – feel free to leave a comment. I’m sure there’s some creative ways to do this that most of us haven’t heard about. Leave your tips!

Good luck journaling with a secure feeling that your personal writing is yours alone.

We’ve heard it all before: creativity is a by-product of madness — or vice-versa. Is there a link? If so, is it the chicken or the egg? Few would doubt that, going back as far as Shakespeare, there is a close connection between creativity of all kinds and emotional turmoil of all kinds. Is it true?

A new book has hit shelves recently that looks at this creativity/madness link by telling the stories of famous creative types and trying to interpret the meaning of it all. I can’t offer a review of the book, as it went into my Amazon basket just tonight. But the idea has always intrigued me and I expect Divine Madness, by Jeffrey A. Kottler, to offer some insight into this mystery of the mind.

Many writers, artists, musicians, actors, designers and others would tell you that they don’t need research, the link is true. But the research is interesting. Consider this from the online periodical Science Frontiers:

The observation that creativity and genius are often allied with psychiatric problems is an ancient one. More recently, male writers have been shown to have high rates of mood disorders and alcoholism.

Perusing these kinds of correlations further, but with the female sex, A. Ludwig, of the University of Kentucky Medical Center, chose as his “creativity” sample 59 female writers attending a Women Writers Conference. These were compared with 59 non-writers matched in terms of social, demographic, and family factors. Psychiatric problems in both groups were elicited through interviews. As the table below shows, the psycho-pathological differences between writers and non-writers are large.

Diagnosis Writers Non-writers
Depression 56% 14%
Mania 19 3
Panic attacks 22 5
Eating disorders 12 2
Drug abuse 17 5
Childhood sexual abuse 39 12
(Anonymous; “Madness and Creativity Revisited,” Science, 266:1483, 1994)

Divine Madness: Ten Stories of Creative Struggle is described by the publisher:

Dramatic stories of famous artists who suffered emotional turmoil in their quest for success and survival In this engaging story of the emotional origins of creativity, Jeffrey Kottler writes about the dramatic and tragic lives of such genius artists as Sylvia Plath, Marilyn Monroe, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Mark Rothko, Judy Garland, Brian Wilson, Charles Mingus, Vaslav Nijinsky and Lenny Bruce . In each case, he writes a fascinating personal story that also analyzes how each of these exceptional women and men struggled to overcome their emotional hardships, and how their psychological issues impacted their lives and work, as well as their great productivity and success.

Creativity, genius, productivity and – madness. It’s all worthy of a new book length examination and I eagerly await Kottler’s latest work, not so much to convince me (I’m more than convinced), but to see how Kottler puts it all in perspective. On a related note, I found this excellent interview, “Creativity, Brilliance and Madness,” from Australia’s ABC Radio National. It’s a fascinating topic that always seems to resonate with those who live the creative life.