Phone Writing Romanticism

Writing on my phone for the first time and discovering the romanticism of it all.

Photo by Chad Madden on Unsplash

I’ve never written anything on my phone. Paper has its place, computers are king, and typewriters, well, how much of a wannabe Hemingway are you? The written word is writing in the end, right? Regardless of medium. I guess I’ve never tried writing on my phone because it seems like the least romantic of them all. It hardly feels like a craft; more like an endless text message that has strayed beyond an unenforceable character limit. Nobody enjoys a long text, especially those awful group ones. Writing on my phone and publishing to the masses is a more acceptable version perhaps. Had I not told you of the tools, you would have had no idea how this house was constructed anyways.

Rare is the writer who pens their first draft on paper. Robert Caro, the LBJ biographer, still writes his first drafts by hand (thousands of pages). Can you imagine the pain from your writer’s arm? How many people truly write this way today? It may be antiquated like the physical books that still fight for relevance, but an author’s connection to the words are undeniable.

Writing is intimate when the pen (or pencil) hits the page, gliding along in a smooth uninterrupted rhythm, with no worry of frozen screens, autocorrects, red underlines, or…