by Elton Gahr

Created on: April 02, 2009

Writing is a solitary and lonely thing, sitting in a room with nothing more than paper, an idea and a few books for company, or so it was until computers and the Internet became a fact of every day life. Writing is now something far different. You may be alone in a room but the company you keep has changed, the access to information has changed, the way you distribute information has changed, your ability to distract yourself from your writing has changed, and most importantly the access to the readers has changed. These changes are still in their infancy and will continue to change the writers community but already this change has been extreme.

One of the major changes that the Internet has created is the ability to connect with other writers. Where once writers would see each other at most once or twice a week at a writers group, it is now possible to be in nearly constant contact with other writers. This make a job which is intensely solitary less so and allows for a new writer to connect with those who have been in the craft longer in a way which is unprecedented. Not only this but because writers by definition write this connection in the writers community is stronger than in many others.

Access to information is another revolutionary change for the writer. It is now possible for someone who just a few years ago would have had to live within easy driving distance of a major university library to have access to more information through the Internet than he would have been able to get almost anywhere in the world before. This not only allows them to live anywhere they want but allows for quick fact checking and the growth of new ideas on the spur of the moment. Other changes wrote by the ability to gather information on writers is nearly immeasurable and it will continue to grow as the availability and ways we gather knowledge from the Internet grow.

With the ability to gather information on the Internet also comes the ability to put information onto it. Blogs, article directories, on-line newspapers and magazines and a hundred other ideas of how to distribute the written word have sprung out of the Internet. This change is also monumental and in addition to changing the types of articles which are written also connected us to the reader of our writing far closer than before. This can be good in the case of the ego stroking letters that writers love or bad in the case of anyone who disagrees with even the smallest point in an article but it is certainly a change

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