Hello.
I did think that desktop computers were dying out and eventually I wouldn’t even be able to buy one.
Then I did my research on drafting and I discovered there’s been a recent increase in sales. People wanting to work from home, perhaps, and hoping the money they spend will buy them a more fixable piece of tech and a longer built-in obsolescence.
If you’re going for sustainable ergonomics, if you love your spine, a desktop PC or Mac with a screen raised to something like eye level is necessary.
Well, the alternative is a separate keyboard from your laptop and your laptop raised on a bespoke little scaffold to eye level. I find that a bit embarrassing.
Here, though, in front of the desktop is where you’re likely to be spending the first and the second and the third of your 10,000 hours. So you might as well make it comfy and sustainable.
A desktop PC, available whenever you need it, in a dedicated workroom is the biggest signifier that you can afford to prioritise your writing. It is the ultimate privilege. As typewriters used to do, desktop PCs mean I’m a proper writer, look at me writing properly.
A rich writer could have identical writing setups in multiple countries around the world, poolside in LA, New York. But she can only use one of these at a time. And it’s time that is more important than any of the means of production of writing.
If you have the choice of putting money into the means or the ends, go for the ends. Take the time over the tech.
Ballpoint pen in a reporter’s notepad is going to do you just as well as a fine desktop that costs you thousands of pounds.
Right in front of me now I have a large screen raised on a metal box about the size of a shoebox. The justification for the large screen and the power it uses is that I can have roughly two A4 size pages up side by side. I can compare drafts. Also I can make print larger and so save my eyes and my eyes do need saving.
What are the differences between using a desktop and a laptop?
A laptop can feel like part of your body. A desktop always remains a slightly distanced, visible piece of equipment.
A desktop resembles a straight-back Pilates-addict sitting opposite you at dinner. A laptop lies where a baby lies or a cat demands to be.
(Why not choose to use something big, formal, and at eye level, rather than something warm in your lap that makes you curl over like Nosferatu looking at a newborn?)
This is why I keep my desktop for the going public of my later drafts, going public if only in anticipation, the idea of going from handwriting to printed text, ‘fiercely legible’, as Henry James said about using a typewriter, about having Theodora Bosanquet as his amanuensis. (I’ll be talking about that, and dictation software, next time.)
So, a desktop, it’s for when I have something I want to clarify and keep, rather than discover and kind of feel out.
Handwriting can remain inward and intimate. It’s where going wrong is the right thing to do, going repeatedly, vividly wrong.
So, PC or Mac?
I’ve used Macintosh computers since people occasionally referred to them as Macintosh computers, rather than Macs or iMacs. There was, for a while, the frisson of not kowtowing to Microsoft, a micro-rebellion that eventually turned into the Cult of Steve. It meant nothing.
However, my university desktop is a Dell, and the introduction of Word for Mac means that I’m very familiar with both PC and Macintosh computer versions of Word. (I prefer the Mac version, I have to say.)
As you’ll already have worked out, I try to reduce my means to their simplest form. When drafting direct onto the screen, I use focus mode to reduce visual information I’m receiving. I turn off all alerts on phone and elsewhere, and that’s the way I try and make the page on the screen as similar to a page of blank A4 paper.
Recently, Co-Pilot, goddammit, Microsoft’s built-in, top-down imposition of AI began to appear as an icon within documents on my work computer and then on my home computer too. I immediately switched to using Scrivener until I could find a way of getting rid of this intrusion.
How can I help?
After an hour of searching enraged chat threads, I discovered I could downgrade the version of Office at home and I could pay less, but I was threatened with various other stuff not working over the coming year.
Around halfway through this day, I realised that I already had my solution to this unwanted presence of Co-Pilot in my workplace. I could do more on the paper page. Until AI is incorporated into fountain pens or the lenses of my glasses, it’s avoidable on the physical surface of wood pulp.
So there may be a limited amount of time in which a desktop computer put into focus mode is going to be an uninterrupted, un-AI space, but for the moment, for these months, it is anyway.
Let me know your thoughts. Do you have a favourite desktop computer that you’ve ever had? Was it a word processor all the way back in Amstrad days, or was it something much more recent?
Have you found some solutions or workarounds that I haven’t thought of? Please let me know in the comments. It’s always great to hear what your thoughts are. Maybe I need to take a completely different approach to something. Just let me know.
And like, share and subscribe. And I very much hope to see you soon.
