I’m curious. What will writers do without paper?
In our growing environmentally conscious society, the reduction of paper in the workplace has already begun. We’re supposed to reduce the amount of paper we use to help save trees, and by extension, the environment. But books are made of paper. (I don’t count e-books here.) In fact, I’ve never seen a book made of anything else. But speaking as a fledgling writer, and more to the point I’m trying to make here, manuscripts are printed on paper. Revisions are made on paper. The whole process of writing involves paper. And to an horrendous degree.
I know of and have heard of people who routinely print out their works (on paper, of course) during the revision process as a method of seeing the work in a new light. I agree with them. I do it too. Seeing my work, whether short story, poem, or the entire manuscript of a novel, gives me a clearer and more realistic vision of the work as it will appear to the reader (of a real book, not an e-book). I print out every story. In some cases, several times. I also read it aloud, and that helps even further in identifying the difficult points of the writing. Especially the redundancies, the difficult points of narration, the confused logic, the plot holes that need to be filled, the weird phrasing that should be revised, the scientific points that have to be explained in some detail. I—and as I said, others—need that printed version.
Paper is relatively cheap. Trees are cut down every day. But it’s a largely unsustainable concept, the idea of turning trees into a thin, white sheet that will accept ink and pencil lead, and the idea of reducing the amount of paper we use is most certainly environmentally proper. Computers have already forced us into a reduction of paper usage. And in my case, a substantial reduction. Without a computer to produce and keep my novels, short stories and poetry, I’d have to have a large file folder of each revision of a novel. That would be a lot of paper. One novel would take up an entire file cabinet drawer. I can’t imagine doing that.
Yet, still, I need to print out a novel to look at it in a “new light.” What are we going to do if paper goes away? To be really, really honest here, I suspect paper will never go away completely. It will always be with us, but we may wind up with much less of it and it will become much more expensive.
In the universe I created for my characters in my sci-fi novels, I put them on a desert planet without much plant life, except in large hydroponic gardens where they grow their food. Thus, they do not have the large trees or the cotton, or even the cellulose, we use to make paper. But—and this is a big but—they do have plastic sheets to print things on, such as photographs and computer images. They still have to have a format for printing. I cannot conceive of a civilization that doesn’t have some sort of ability to “print” writing and images. Perhaps in the distant future, the concept of “printing” will become obsolete, and computer images—of writing, of pictures, etc.—will be all we will have. But how will writers “print” out a manuscript to get a look at it? They’ll be limited to the computer version. Will that make writing worse in the long run?