Gimme some writing space!

Introduction

Writing Spaces are a very intriguing concept in the sphere of writing that we often forget to consider. Whether it be a computer screen, loose-leaf paper, or stone tablets, the medium through which we communicate can be just as important as the message behind our writing.

Information

As pointed out by J. David Bolter, “Writing, even writing on a computer screen, is a material practice, and it becomes difficult for a culture to decide where thinking ends and the materiality of writing begins, where the mind ends and where the writing space begins” meaning that the line between the thoughts in our brains and the words that represent them is very blurred. Walter Ong’s philosophy compounds this. This philosophy is that writing fundamentally reshapes our consciousness. An example of that would be how before learning to read one would have no idea what letters mean inherently, but after learning to read they would never be able to forget.

One must wonder though if writing reshaping our consciousness is truly a good thing. One could see it as an artist sculpting a piece of malleable clay into something functional. On the other hand, someone could personify it as a piece of clay being frozen in place forever with no way of changing.

Anecdote

This entire concept of writing spaces reminded me of a personal experience. In high school I took a creative writing class wherein each week we would have a different writer that we briefly analyzed and spoke about. There were storytellers like A. A. Milne, songwriters like Bruce Springsteen, and poets like Maya Angelou. However, I can recall being very confused when one of our writers of the week was the painter Bob Ross.

We all challenged the notion that Ross was a writer, but our teacher argued that he was. He just did not actually write things down, but instead spoke his thoughts aloud and recorded them on the “Joy of Painting” show. In this way, he was a writer that never utilized a straightforward written medium. His writing space was instead the recorded word. This raises the question, must one write to be a writer?