Is Writing an Art?

Writing as Art. Is it a thing? I had to google it.

I enjoyed creative writing in high school, and throughout high school I kept a hand written diary which I made entries in quite religiously.

Recently I rummaged through a plastic tub full of high school love letters and diaries (a memory container!). In it I found A4 sheets stapled and taped together, when un-ravelled and laid out on the floor it went from my lounge room to the hallway in length! I instantly remembered what this was. It was a thing we used to do at Edwina’s place. Punch a cone, go to the A4 sheet on the wall and write.

It was your choice whether to continue on, or debate, or contribute or completely ignore the previous entry, whatever the case, you just had to write your bit. I started reading some of it; “Fluorescence! We are fluorescence!”, it’s all pretty whack, but quite beautiful and mind altering. All of this is the very definition of creative writing to me.

I wrote a lot throughout university but I no longer hand wrote. I used a typewriter for a year but finally caved in and started using the computer to write.

Initially I was writing everything in Outlook Express, an email app. Outlook would underline spelling errors in red and sentences that were too long in red too. I got better at writing by using Outlook. I started to spell better and I also started to learn how to order a sentence better by cutting and pasting words from back to front and vice versa. This cutting and pasting was something I couldn’t do on the typewriter so I never went back.

Eventually I got sick of Outlook as it didn’t accept my writing style. I try to write how I speak. I ramble a lot and thus I use a lot of dots… every time I’d use these pauses I’d get red lines and having red lines all over the place whilst I was writing was really starting to piss me off.

I’ve heard of multi-platform add-ons I can use to check my spelling and grammar but I’m not too interested to be honest. I’m not getting too many red underlines right now, looks like either I’ve finally conformed to how my computer wants me to write, or AI has honed in, recognised and accepted the way I write?! Creepy… right?!

Also on Medium.