When I graduated with a degree in newspaper journalism, “selectric” typewriters were state of the art technology, and phones that you could put in a purse or a pocket were as much the stuff of fiction as teleportation devices in Star Trek. My first writing job was stringing for a large Milwaukee daily newspaper–little writing involved actually, as the stories were called in on evening deadline to the copy desk using a…if you remember these…pay phone! (I think there was a thriller a few years ago with Colin Farrell involving one of those prominently in the plot.) Still, there were the occasional feature article assignments, and those I could take my time with. Typically I composed those longhand–often with a fountain pen–and then took my notes into the newsroom and typed them in on the computer. That system lasted until my editor walked past, looked over my shoulder, and said “you’ve got to learn to do this on a VDT.” That’s ancient Latin for “video display terminal.” Very trendy new stuff back in the early 80s.

More reporting and composing followed, then a freelance career from home with a home computer. Working on deadline to meet the FedEx driver on time while juggling several kids made sitting down with a pen and a legal pad and processing words twice when once would do a luxury of the past. Composing on a keyboard became second nature–ease of editing, the ability to start in the middle if you were stumped for a lead and then move paragraphs around, speed in delivering the finished product. But…the grass is always greener, even if you don’t recognize it right away.

Some years later, I finally had some free time on a regular basis and sat down to play with writing some fiction. And for some reason, curling up in a corner of the sofa with a legal pad again became a tangible pleasure. In addition to cocooning in a comfortable seat with a cup of tea and a good view out the living room window, another thing I found was that I had to slow down my thoughts because they no longer sped like sparks from my brain to my fingertips to the screen in front of me. Sentences became more nuanced, ideas became more intricate, patterns of language because more richly textured. Wow!! Who knew?

So these days it’s kind of a horse apiece. With my blog, I find that I’ll often just take a few free minutes sitting in my car or by the lakefront with a small pad of paper and start letting words rip freely, connected by loops and arrows and hash marks and scratch outs, looking much more like an actual work in progress than any Microsoft Word file on a screen ever did. At work as a prosecutor on the other hand, with letters and appellate briefs and motions to file at a dead run, it’s writing at the keyboard all the way. Though every once in a while I’ll still pull over to the side of the road as an idea hits me between the eyes at seventy miles an hour, and then write it down by hand on a spare Dairy Queen napkin so I don’t lose the thought!