Reading on paper vs. screen: Why I prefer the page

In an age of ubiquitous glowing screens filled with endless, scrolling seas of text and images, I find myself increasingly drawn to reading on paper vs. screen, and I relish the relatively old-fashioned experience of solitary, disconnected, page-based reading. I find that I read better in this form, with greater enjoyment and understanding. I love to immerse myself in a book, journal, story, article, or essay (or poem, play, etc.) in the relatively peaceful, focused realm of the offline and the analog, where I can become deeply and totally absorbed in private communion with the author and his or her vision.

This may, I suppose, be a function of my upbringing in the pre-internet era, when all reading was done on paper. I didn’t acquire my first computer, an Apple IIe, until I was 14 years old, and the idea of reading a book on that green-lit screen was unthinkable (though I did read a ton of words on it while playing text-based fantasy games like Wizardry). The internet didn’t enter my world until I was in my mid-twenties, when the World Wide Web became publicly available, and by that time my set point as a reader was essentially established.

Though it took me some time to recognize the differences between online and page-based reading, I eventually came to understand that my preference for reading on paper vs. screen is rooted in something deeper: I crave text that is static and set, not fluid and reflowing. I want to read words that are carefully laid out on stable pages instead of ones that shimmer and shift like quicksilver, or like Proteus morphing under my hands into endlessly shifting shapes.

Such text, it turns out—the stable, set kind, I mean—forms an automatic aid to mapping and remembering what I have read. It provides something I can return to, reference, and use as a scaffolding for knowledge, memory, and appreciation. I can’t tell you how many important paragraphs and passages in my personal library of life-changing books I can still map in memory to their physical positioning on the page where I first encountered them and underlined or annotated them by hand. Additionally, text like this, deliberately laid out on pages with care for arrangement, appearance, and the coherence of these qualities with the actual content of the words, is much more amenable to that deep immersion. You can lose yourself in it.

For more on this theme, see my Living Dark essay, “Introducing the Living Dark Reader,” where I explore this approach to reading and the idea of curating a personal, slow-reading digital magazine.

Against personal branding

  • Post category:Creativity
  • Reading time:2 mins read

I couldn’t care less whether anything that I publish here or anywhere else is “on brand.” What does that even mean? Aside from the troubling (and faintly ridiculous) livestock connotations of the term “brand” to begin with, what is my personal signal or signature anyway? It’s precisely whatever interests me and wants to come through me in this moment, without fundamental regard for its fortunes or reception. In this sense, on this level, I am ardently and fundamentally against personal branding, or more specifically, on burning up much or any of my precious creative energy on it.

Well-crafted communiques tuned for clarity of expression in the context of the total rhetorical moment—yes.

Manipulative, extractive attempts to maximize some preselected outcome based on egoic notions of success—no.

The inbuilt serendipity of this dream of me-plus-world will serve as a kind of synchronicity machine, making the right connections manifest. All I have to do is show up and cooperate with what happens to be my deepest identity and impulse in the first place. Any apparent “effects” are really just side effects—things to observe and enjoy along the way without grasping at them, assigning them presupposed value, or turning them into a programmatic goal aimed at controlling how they land and what they do or don’t accomplish in rounding out some image of me in my own or anyone else’s mind.

Perhaps needless to say, if you are a writer yourself, I recommend adopting a version of this same attitude, appropriately tuned and calibrated to your own sensibility. Branding as such is actually fine for practical purposes in the commercial arena. But its potential to breach its rightful limits and invade our core self-sense at the fundamental creative-motivational level is real, and also something we should seriously guard against. Your inner genius is too valuable to be sacrificed on the altar of marketing.

(For sage advice on finding the organic connection between your deep creativity and the matter of communicating your work to other people, see Dan Blank’s excellent book You Are the Gateway.)

My bias

A brief note on a bias that I’m aware of within myself:

I fundamentally don’t care about finding ways to quantify qualitative data. I’m much more interested in finding ways to qualify quantitative data.

I have a Ph.D. and a master’s degree, and I’m a college vice president, and I’m obliged to work with and think in terms of numbers every day. But the data that drive me in our current culture of the “data-driven” imperative are humanistic, philosophical, spiritual, and meaning-based. Enough with numbers and the obsession with them. What’s important is the human stories and existential realities these numbers abstractly represent.

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My interview for The Creative Penn podcast

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Joanna Penn, bestselling author and creative entrepreneur, on her podcast, The Creative Penn.

The episode, titled “Writing at the Wellspring: Tapping the Source of Your Inner Genius,” explores many of the core ideas behind my recent book, including the role of the muse or daemon, the nature of creative silence, and the relationship between artistic practice and spiritual inquiry. We also talked a bit about the relationship between creative practice and the nature of cosmic fear.

Joanna was kind enough to describe the book as:

“a guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning. Part craft, part devotion, Writing at the Wellspring is a call to surrender control, listen beneath the noise, and create from the place where awe and fear meet. If the page is a threshold, this book will show you how to cross.”

In our conversation, we discuss:

  • The idea of creativity as collaboration with something beyond the conscious self
  • Why periods of silence, inertia, or “writer’s block” may be integral to the creative process
  • The deeper psychological and spiritual dimensions of writing
  • The overlap between creativity and the themes of cosmic horror
  • How long-form writing projects can grow organically from blogs and ongoing reflection

You can listen to the interview through the YouTube link above or visit the official episode page (with show notes and transcript).

Reader reviews of ‘Writing at the Wellspring’

  • Post category:Book News
  • Reading time:2 mins read
Cover of Writing at the Wellspring

Two months into its existence, here are some enthusiastic comments from various reader reviews of Writing at the Wellspring:

  • “It easily earns its place on my shelf of texts that have challenged and changed how I think about writing and the creative life.”
  • “What I’m thoroughly enjoying is the way Matt Cardin weaves those deep, existential questions in and out of the practical, grounded realities of writing itself…This is a book that doesn’t just talk about creativity; it inhabits it.”
  • “Matt has put into words things that have been alive in me for a long time, but which I have never articulated myself.”
  • “There is potential here to change your life…Cardin’s writing stirred something dormant in me.”
  • “This is definitely more than a self-help book on creativity. Matt Cardin’s range of scholarship, casual reading, philosophical spelunking and theological scholarship here forms into one single vision…If Colin Wilson and Krishnamurti and ST Joshi had written a tome on the essentials of creativity, it would be something like this.”
  • “It was incredible finding an author able to describe how to unlock the skills I’ve been working on even further.”
  • “This book is by far the best book I have read on creativity. I hope it will reach many people and help them freed from creative block, procrastination, paralyzing self-doubt, and perfectionism.”
  • “This isn’t a how-to book about writing. It’s a book about why writing matters, and what it’s actually touching when it’s real.”

You can buy the book anywhere.