People like to say technology changed my job.
That sounds neat. Clean. Logical.
It isn’t exactly true.
The job itself hasn’t changed much at all. I still sit in a chair, stare at words, move them around, delete half of them, and try to make the other half sound like I knew what I was doing all along. The difference is the tools I use now would’ve looked like science fiction when I started.
Back then, writing meant a legal pad, a typewriter, or later a desktop computer that took ten minutes to boot and another ten minutes to crash. If you wanted to look something up, you grabbed a book, not a search bar. If you made a mistake, you fixed it yourself. There was no auto-correct, no grammar checker, and definitely no artificial intelligence offering suggestions like an overeager intern who never sleeps.
There was no autosave.
You learned real quick what that meant.
Hard drive failures.
Twenty megabytes of storage if you were lucky.
Our operating system lived on floppy disks.
The printer screamed like a wounded animal every time the dot-matrix decided to cooperate.
And there were actual arguments about which program was better —
Word, WordPerfect, or Lotus 1-2-3 —
like the fate of civilization depended on it.
You didn’t trust the machine,
and the machine sure as hell didn’t care about you.
Now I carry more storage on a flash drive than we had in an entire room full of computers back then.
Hard drives fit in your shirt pocket.
Now my desk looks like the control panel of a small spaceship.
I’ve got a laptop, a tablet, cloud storage, editing software, and enough passwords to qualify as a part-time cryptographer. Half the time I don’t know if I’m writing, formatting, uploading, backing up, syncing, or troubleshooting.
Technology didn’t make the work easier.
It made the work possible — and complicated in ways nobody warned us about.
The biggest change isn’t speed.
It’s expectation.
Because everything is faster now, everyone assumes everything should be faster.
Write faster.
Edit faster.
Post faster.
Respond faster.
Create more.
Produce more.
Some days it feels like the job isn’t writing anymore.
It’s managing the machines that make writing possible.
And yet, with all this technology sitting on my desk, I still reach for a pen and a notebook when I start something new.
Stories. Poems. Prose.
The first draft usually happens the old way — ink on paper, crossing things out, arrows in the margins, pages that look like a crime scene by the time I’m done.
And underneath all the screens, all the software, all the updates and logins and notifications… the real work is still the same.
You sit down.
You face the blank page.
You try to say something true.
Technology can give you better tools, but it can’t give you better ideas.
It can help you fix a sentence, but it can’t tell you what needs to be said.
It can store everything you’ve ever written, but it can’t tell you if any of it matters.
If anything, technology has made the job more honest.
There’s nowhere to hide now.
No excuse about not having the right equipment.
No reason you can’t write today.
The tools are always there.
Waiting.
Charged.
Connected.
Which means the only thing left to blame…
is you.
And oddly enough, I think that’s a good thing.
Because no matter how much technology changes, the job is still the same one it’s always been.
Sit down.
Do the work.
Tell the truth.
Everything else is just wiring.
Memoirs of Madness 