How to feel like a “real” writer (or dog person)

On practicality and romance and one not precluding the other

I write better on a laptop than real paper. I’ve been insecure about this for as long as I can remember. As a kid I made desperate attempts to keep journals—I collected physical notebooks, had convinced my family I was a “writer” and so received them as frequent gifts—and was distraught by each inevitable fizzle. I’d mark a few pages before stepping back to admire the shape of the paper and typeface of the date field and then continue my “real” writing (whatever nonsense that constituted) on a computer.

The only time I successfully kept an analog journal was in Thailand. One day at base camp a guide asked “what are you always doing in that notebook?” and I blushed with hesitant pride: I am a writer. Even then, my handwritten success was mostly because lugging my laptop around was impractical, and I’d have had to worry about the battery, and most of all it would have been easier for people to read over my shoulder. (I purposefully wrote in messy cursive that is to this day hard for me to decipher.)

The thing I know logically: Writing is writing, whether on an old laptop or in a beautiful notebook or simply my head. (Verlyn Klinkenborg, author of my favorite book on writing, says above all the job of a writer is creating sentences in their head.) I believe this. I still feel I’m somehow doing it wrong.

The tool to move words into the physical world is not my only writing insecurity. I am full of them, and most are silly because they have so little to do with the quality of a piece and so much to do with my weird internalized impressions of romance.