Creative Writer

Sorry for the microscopic Bloglet entries lately. It’s not that I don’t have anything long-winded to share, I’ve just been busy.

So has my mother because one of the rooms in the house has been completely dismantled. She unearthed everything that has ever been acquired for our home computer. This includes the original CD-ROM for Microsoft’s Creative Writer. I got it for my birthday in 1995. At that age, I enjoyed writing in school, especially themed poems and had fun playing around with the kid-friendly program. It was like a video game-slash-word processor and all the documents I created were splashed with intense clip-art, borders, and ridiculous fonts. Every button (i.e. cut, paste, undo) was accompanied by a sound effect and, if you got tired of the Writing Studio, you could tour around Imaginopolis.

By the time I got Creative Writer 2, I had a big, clunky laptop to work on up in my room and writing was my ‘thing.’ It wasn’t so much about how I could embellish school projects as how I could find an outlet for all that I wanted to say. I soon graduated to Microsoft Word and the rest is history.

It’s interesting to consider how the use of computers has changed my life. We had this crotchety nun who taught us how to use them in grade school. I have to thank her, though, for making me learn how to be a fast, effective typist. I couldn’t write otherwise. The ideas come too fast for me not to know innately where the keys are. Does it matter that we learned using a program for Apple II computers? AKA the ones with the black screens and fluorescent green writing? Of course not. I’ve never been on the cutting edge of technology, but that’s not what’s important.

For a lot of people, the advent of AOL and especially instant messaging was the big turning point. Or it was Napster and downloadable music. For me, it was Creative Writer. It was the ability to put something on paper in a simplified way. The logistics of it have changed. I no longer save my work on brightly-colored floppy disks; I have an external hard drive. I haven’t used clip-art in years; I don’t even know what pictures Word 2007 has.

Technology keeps improving on itself season after season. I like to think that my writing grows up at that rate too. The escalating pace of modern life and rapid obsolescence mirrors my writing process. Maura Pennington Original First Drafts are as laughable as gigantic car-phones. But you have to start somewhere. So, thanks Creative Writer and the now-defunct department of Microsoft Kids!