Hello,
Today I’m going to talk about Smart Pens — in other words, the kind of pens that work with a digital notepad.
Some of the brands available: Remarkable 2, Remarkable Paper Pro — those are the ones I’ve looked at most seriously as possibilities. They seem to be the most highly recommended. Amazon Kindle Scribe — not going there. Kobo Libre Color, Supernote A5 X2 Manta.
And then there’s the Moleskine Smart Writing Set with the Smart Pen, which, as I understand it, is a bit more like writing in a normal notebook. But the Smart Pen understands the shapes of the letters, senses them, and sends them off somewhere so that they can be read as if they’ve been written on a different surface — on the surface of a screen. And then, of course, the advantage is that they can be turned into type pretty easily, if you’ve got software that understands your handwriting.
(Does such software exist?)
Of all of these, I have only the experience of standing in the Moleskine shop on Oxford Street with a salesperson standing at my elbow, and writing a few word-shapes to see how the Smart Pen felt. The Smart Pen felt fine. It felt exciting and quite futuristic.
The advantage of this — of using a Smart Pen — is clearly the advantage that’s advertised, which is that you produce your text really spontaneously. You just write, not even thinking about the means you’re using. And it’s in two places at once. It’s on the digital page in front of you, which you can flip over, you can go back and forth, you can draw lines in just as freely as you can with a normal page — and more freely than you can with word-processing software, where you’re using the corrections or the suggestions part of, say, Word for Mac.
Instead of that, you are producing a text that also goes to the cloud. It’s handwritten, but it’s also backed up as ones and zeros in a data centre. That is an advantage. I can see that it might cut out the stage of typing up.
But when I get onto handwriting and typing out, I’ll be talking about the advantages of going from a handwritten page to a typewritten page as a really important stage — in looking at yourself, in looking at what you’ve done, and seeing a transition from a private form of writing to one that’s public, to one that is at least speaking out in a way that’s kind of clear and looks more like a finished text, if you use Times New Roman or some other font.
And so that very extra labour of typing your own stuff out, I think, is a useful stage.
But let’s say you wanted to produce a lot of writing really fast, and handwriting was where you wanted to do your first draft, and then you didn’t want to do any kind of second draft that involved typing up. You want to go straight to the third draft, which is just correcting. Maybe the Smart Pen is the solution there. Maybe the digital notepad is the way it should go.
(Do you already use a Smart Pen, or something like? Why? What are the advantages? What have I not seen?)
But I started thinking about this — of course I did — in environmental terms and also in personal terms. I don’t really trust digital stuff to last. I’ve lost too many files, and I don’t like the idea of what I write being trapped within modish formats that only last a decade or so.
My earliest stuff — my earliest writing — some of it is stuck in ClarisWorks text files, inaccessible, unless I send it to someone, somewhere, halfway up a mountain in Wales, who can maybe get it off those floppy disks.
So this is what I wrote about Smart Pens.
For a while, I’ve been concerned that my loyalty to physical pen and paper — to the simplest of non-electronic means — was retrograde, deliberately old-fashioned. Why not use all the technological advances possible? This scribbled sentence here could, as I was putting it down, also have filed itself away in the cloud — meaning a data centre — if I’d used a digital pen.
More recently, I realise I’m not being backward-looking or nostalgic at all. I’m anticipating and habituating myself to a post-collapse future. How I write is dependent on me being able to see the page and hold the pen or pencil, and being able to get hold of pen, pencil, ink, and dry paper. But it doesn’t require electricity — not where I am, not if I have the means and I’m warm enough.
If society completely collapses, or falls apart pretty much, and no paper is manufactured, I will, I suppose, go to writing poems in my head and constructing spoken-word stories, or just writing a cappella songs. There will be no other distribution networks than circles round bonfires. I’ll have to write what’s immediately memorable to other people.
At this point — this horrible imagined future — I’m unlikely to be writing a novel. Anyone else is unlikely to be writing a novel. Like the rest of us, I’ll be preoccupied with other things.
You start me thinking about smart pens and I end up thinking about the end of the world. That’s pretty much it.
I hope you’ve enjoyed today, and will like, share and subscribe, and that I can see you soon.
