Early IBM word processor.
I was working as a magazine writer and editor back in the late 1970s when one of my colleagues told me about this great new tool. “Word processing” he called it. I tend to be a skeptic where technology is concerned, not quite a Luddite but more like a 100-million-sold adopter. My response then was, “I don’t get it. How is this better than my Smith-Corona?” We debated the issue for months before the day arrived when our office’s publishing system (controlled by powers far above our grade level) changed and suddenly we were all word processing.
I realize this will sound ludicrously quaint to anyone born Gen X or later, but the question of whether word processing is a good thing is one that matters to serious writers. A month or two back Garrison Keillor, on his radio show the Writer’s Almanac , quoted the British-American poet Denise Levertov (1923-1997) warning against word processors for poets in particular. Her take:
The late poet Denise Levertov.
If you copy something out by hand, before you move onto the typewriter, you’ve already gone on making minor changes. This is an intuitive part of the creative process, and one that’s eliminated by the use of word processors. People get such a completed-looking copy that they think the poem is done. The word processor doesn’t take as much time as actually forming the letters with your hand at the end of your arm which is attached to your body. It’s a different kind of thing. They don’t realize that this laborious process is part of the creative process.
I know what Levertov means because back in my youth working on that magazine, I wrote my first drafts by hand. That was mainly because I was lousy typist and I could get my thoughts down on paper more quickly that way. Then for the second and “final’ draft, the one to be preserved, I’d type up my messily crossed out and emended draft, revising once again even as I typed. This style of writing is like slow food – laborious, hand-crafted, and presumably leading to a high-quality end result. Speed is not of the essence. Interestingly, however, this is exactly the method the prolific John Updike used during his entire career as a novelist.
Use no unnecessary words.
Hatred of the typewriter (a less sophisticated form of word processor when you think about it) may even have played a role in generating much conventional wisdom about writing. William Strunk, Jr., the Cornell professor who wrote the original version of that universal manual for writers of all types, The Elements of Style, disliked typewriters intensely. When E.B. White added his revisions years later to make the second edition of the book most writers know fondly as “Strunk and White,” he was working from Strunk’s original handwritten manuscript. Seen in that light, their famous prescription for good writing may have been influenced by Strunk’s animus against the logorrhea machine-writing seems to inspire.
A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.
Just so. He who handwrites his sentences would want no unnecessary words.
As I look back over my own long history of attempting to put words on paper, or at least onto a computer screen, I recall many cases of writer’s block induced, I suspect, by a combo of the always awe-inspiring blank page and a dread of the messiness inherent in handwritten revision. A worst-case memory: when I took a scholarship exam for college with a roomful of other applicants, we were given an hour to write an essay. I managed to get only seven sentences down in that hour. Eventually, over the course of college, I did learn to force myself to do frantic, hand-cramping brain dumps into blue books to get through “essay” exams. One of many reasons I’m glad to be beyond college is that I no longer have to perform these churning regurgitations.
The point is that word processing, despite my initial reluctance, turned out to be crucial in busting the words loose for me. It helped turned the act of writing from what I dreaded most up to about age 30 into one of my greatest pleasures these days. I’m not sure of the precise psychological adjustment, but it’s encapsulated in my current creed: “Just slap some words down on that screen. Do it fast. Revisions will come later. Just get started.” That attitude, fostered by the word processor, has made all the difference.
Levertov is right about the pseudo-permanence that words in type can acquire. Word processing does make revision marginally more difficult because the words somehow seem legit, final as soon as they become typefaces on a screen, far harder to change than my handwritten scrawl. But we’ll save the art of revision for a future post.
For a fascinating account of the roots of word processing, which one might say started with Gutenberg, see Brian Kunde’s 1986 college paper, “A Brief History of Word Processing.”
And what about you? Do you still write by hand?
Ted the Cat (1994-present) is a domestic shorthair blogger and vers libre poet. He also enjoys sleeping, eating, and lurking. Ted the Cat co-habits with Kaze,
also a blogger at 317am.net.
I do not write essays, I wish I could. I can however say this: I take pleasure in handwriting notes, thank you etc., and I have been told that the persons receiving these notes appreciate them much more than a typewritten one or e-mail. This is not as important as the stories you are talking about, but is the only way I can relate to them!
Thank you for these interesting blogs.
Delores
Thank you, Delores, for your nice comments. There is something about a handwritten note that really signifies personal caring. Sadly, my own handwriting these days is so poor that I can hardly read it myself.
I love the world processor. When I was a teen I wrote my first half a novel by hand. There were many huge gaps in narrative created by my fevered hormone soaked brain racing faster than my fingers. I disagree about words seeming more permanent, and thus harder to cut, on the computer monitor. To me they are so much more ephemeral, and this editable.
Interesting comment, Dan. Sounds like word processing busted loose your creativity, as it did for me. On the editing front, I see both sides. I do know that even with words in type, I’m an inveterate editor, and if given a chance to edit anything I’ve ever written, I do it.
Thank you for fostering a moment of exquisite relief when I reveled in the fact that I never have to write anything in a blue book again. Like Delores, I also hand-write lots of notes and cards, and still scrawl all my meeting notes by hand. I am skeptical of folks who bring laptops to meetings and sessions- they may ostensibly be taking notes or capturing their thoughts in real-time, but I think we all know they’re checking Facebook.
In the workplace I see a lot of the younger generation – interns and fresh hires and the like – taking notes on laptops and I’m impressed and envious. I’m a compulsive handwritten note-taker myself. It’s part habit, acquired over years as a reporter, and part effort to keep myself awake in meetings. Too old to change. And yes, Caroline, the very thought of blue books gives me the creeps years after the traumas they inflicted on me.
How I remember my days of defeat in my struggles with the typewriter at a now defunct government publication (of course, anxiety and lack of discipline had a lot to do with it!) But at the same time, I had my first experience with a lumbering word processor writing at The Washington Star and found it immediately liberating. The idea you could just throw stuff up on the screen, slice and dice and move it around, introduced the anxiety-relieving element of play — musicans used to call it noodling? –into the process. Soon, I was engrossed in thoughts and the words and inhibitions fell by the wayside. Then, on to graduate school, back to the Selectric and . . . disaster. Picture the scene where Billy Crystal, in Throw Momma From The Train, tries in vain to start his novel. “The night was . . . humid . . .”
I understand the poet’s point however. I’ve seen thousands of papers come from my wife’s students over the years, clearly reflecting the young author’s confidence that the right combination of font choice and spell checking would prove to be adequate compensation for a complete lack of content or thought process. And now with Facebook and Twitter, Stream of Consciousness is king, 15 minutes of fame has gone 24/7, and revision is soooo yesterday.
Well said, Ken. You have learned to get those words down in fine order over the years. Clearly for us, word processing – I like the word “noodling” – has been a liberating force. Yet I too can’t shake the thought that it’s something of a double-edged sword. Or maybe a better metaphor – it’s akin to that innocent-looking apple pealer that sliced off the end of my little finger last year as I worked what I thought was so efficiently in the kitchen.