To replace my old laptop, I have a new one. It is a rose gold MacBook Air. I’m an aesthete, so I want my glorified typewriter to be pretty.
Some people will argue and say that it’s not really necessary for a writer to buy something so expensive, but I like Apple products and I’ve come to realise that they have served me well. Many a time, a windows computer has crashed but the work I have done is not saved. With Apple, my work on Pages or Word comes up after I boot it up and a previous version of the document has been saved. This has reduced my anxiety over my work greatly over the years, and I’ve come to realise one thing.
Good equipment that you need to do good work with is expensive.
This is a very hard entry for me to write because a writer’s work is almost never valued. A lot of the time, when we show our drafts to people, our drafts are just that–drafts. People don’t really see the potential in it and shoot us down. Much of the work that writers and creative people do is not valued, and yet good quality brushes, tablets, and software is expensive. These essentials enable us to do the best work we can do.
I could have gotten a cheaper PC that ran Windows, but I chose not to. Windows has failed me many a time and the hard drive has crashed randomly. My Mac never failed me for six years and it’s so easy to back up what I need. I don’t like how Windows computers stop responding (i.e., hanging, as we call it) and so on and so forth.
I recognise that this may come across as whiny–here I am, complaining that what I have to buy as a writer is expensive. Why then, did I choose to be a writer? Writers are always needed in society. They hold up a mirror to the world and they expose the truth through it. Writers are necessary, even if they don’t fit into the mould of capitalism.