Hello all! Remember when I started this blog and I claimed that part of its purpose was to post my creative writing projects? If you've been dutifully scrolling through pictures of Hazel waiting for the real show to begin, today's your day.
I've decided to start by posting some old writing from my Google Drive Creative Writing folder. Part of what I found exciting about starting my own blog was the prospect of finally having a place to publish my writing because it's something I've dabbled in for almost my entire life but rarely had a meaningful audience for, which has at times been disheartening.
Today's entry in the archives is from November 10, 2018. It was the founding document of my Creative Writing folder in Google Drive, which, up to that point, had only really been a place where I saved work documents. I considered not posting this one because it was more of a warm-up, I thought, than an actual piece of creative writing, but rereading it, I think it's actually an interesting and decently written meditation.
So, without further ado, here is "To Write Your Words in the Cloud."
Here I am, typing the first words of any creative writing project I have ever undertaken on a Google Doc. Google Docs was not my first choice of medium, but right as I was clicking the search bar in the bottom left of my computer’s home screen, about to type “Word,” I remembered that Microsoft Word isn’t how it used to be, where you would buy it, download it to your computer, and that was that. You may still have the 2003 version in 2013, but that was fine. Sure, you might be missing out on the latest features and perhaps were setting yourself up for compatibility issues, buuuut… no real repercussions. You could keep word processing away.
But now, Microsoft has taken a different approach. You no longer purchase a program once. You merely lease it, paying a subscription fee. Once that subscription expires, time to pay up again if you want to continue using Microsoft programs. That’s why I do my budgeting on Google Sheets now or whatever the Google version of Microsoft Excel is.
No big deal, really, it’s not. But, it was with a small amount of wistfulness that I clicked over to the orange and teal swirl to open Firefox instead of continuing my search to open a Word document. I mean, there’s all the associations of work, I suppose, that come rushing in as soon as I open Google Drive. It’s what I see day in and day out at school. It is where ALL of my work, more or less, for school is done. Outside of lesson planning in a notebook and attendance records in another notebook, every worksheet, PowerPoint, unit plan, test, everything for my classes is created and stored in my Google Drive. Even as I open it, it suggests dictatio worksheets, Latin presentations, even the script for the National Honor Society convocation. There is something unsettling about keeping my work and my creative expressions all within the same complex of storage, about seeing the all-too-familiar home page when I am curled on my couch ready to spend an evening writing for fun.
But there is something even beyond the blurring of the lines between home and work. With the exception a few brief stints of fanfiction handwritten in notebooks, all of my creative writing endeavors have always been typed in the secure confines of a Word document. Dating back to my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle fanfiction typed on the desktop computer in my parents’ room when I was 8, using a Word document has been the constant of my personal writing documents, even the journal I kept in high school. There is something that feels cozy about a Word document, the privacy of it-- I’m not paranoid about cybersecurity, but it’s hard to argue that being online is more private than typing your thoughts and creativity into a document that only exists on your own personal computer’s hard drive. Once it’s cloud stored, there’s something less private about it, less personal.
No, I don’t think it’s likely that anyone is going to hack into my Google Drive, but there is something so personal about the file only existing for me. It’s the best of both worlds-the speed and ease of typing combined with the individual, private nature of a notebook. The writing in a notebook can only be accessed by someone possessing that physical object, the pages where the author’s hand rested, the lead or ink that was from the implement in the writer’s own hand. A file saved to an individual machine’s hard drive is like that. Only someone who can access my computer, with the keys that I used to type that document, can see what is written there. Someone looking at the same glass as I looked at as I stared at the words forming on the screen. Now the sense of transferability-- any machine can display these words, it is saved on the Internet, the great common space of the modern world-- somehow makes me miss those nights spent at my parents’ old house, typing stories that would only ever exist in that corner of the room.
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