Google Docs Can Revolutionize Your Poetic Lifestyle

Since I returned from my brief holiday hiatus, I put some thought into what would be the first post in Twenty Ten. I decided to go with a tool that's been around for a while, and one that has a great many applications outside of poetry. However its implications for creative work are what makes it particularly compelling to me.

Google Docs is a web-based document-processing product that's been around in some form since late 2006, but I'm routinely shocked by the number of people who've never heard of it or think it has no use to them. Docs is Google's ace in the whole when it comes to dealing with Microsoft's juggernaut Office product. And for those of you who regularly use Microsoft Office, Google Docs will look almost eerily familiar to you:

A Room of One's Own: WriteRoom Makes Writing Distraction-Free

For all writers, and poets in particular, composition is as much an act of concentration as it is one of creativity. Many poets often talk about needing "time to write," but what most of them mean is "time alone." Poetry is both reflexive and reflective: solitude and concentration are usually just as important, if not more important, than the creative spark.

It's for this reason that most poets I know prefer hand-writing their work in a notebook [usually a Moleskine] to typing it into a word processor. One of the main reasons for writing this way, beyond the tactile pleasure of it, is the effortless concentration it provides. In a notebook, it is you and the page. If you've managed to find a solitary spot, there's nothing to get between you and your writing.

On today's computers, there's really nothing analogous to a blank page. Our operating systems are filled with dings, whistles, and flashing notifications; our browsers are almost always open, luring us to look at what the world is saying; and our word processors are bloated with so-called features.