I’ve been writing
long enough to remember typing my first manuscripts on a manual typewriter.
Progressing to an electric typewriter with a limited capacity for memory was an
exciting day! Now I look back at that and shudder. Like most writers today I
treasure my word processing program. Revising on a typewriter was difficult.
Even a small change meant retyping the whole page. And cut and paste was quite
literally done with scissors and glue.
In Page Fright, Harry Bruce says that writers who turned to
the word processor in its early days were like religious converts, their eyes
gleaming with wonder. He quotes novelist Frank Conroy who said, “God looked
down at the writers and said, ‘I haven’t done anything for these people for a
long time, hundreds of years, so I’m going to make up for it.’ “
There were
skeptics too. The American writer William Zinsser wondered why he should change
from equipment that had served him well for decades. He said, “Why risk writing
into a humming winking box that, owing to one slip of one finger, might destroy
his entire masterpiece-in-progress?” He
changed his mind quickly though when he tried one. “Real sentences began to
appear on the screen, one after another. Then I had a real paragraph. Then I
started another paragraph. Soon I had a second paragraph! I was writing!”
He went on to say,
“There’s no kind of tinkering that you can’t do – and undo – instantly. When
you finish your revisions, the machine will paginate your entire article and
the printer will type it while you go and have a beer.”
Leon Edel,
American biographer, said, “I didn’t like the machine’s insolence. It tried to
make me its slave.”
Tom Sharpe agreed.
“That bloody cursor blinking at me on the word processor screen is awful. I
mean it’s blink, blink, blink. Well, screw this bastard.”
Novelist Josephine
Hart said, “The machines seem to have a mind of their own.”
Martin Amis said,
“The little cursor, or whatever it’s called, that wobbles around the middle of
the screen falsely gives you the impression that you’re thinking. Even when
you’re not.”
Humorist P.J.
O’Rourke said he refused “to have some pubescent twerp with his mom’s earring
in his tongue, who combs his hair with Redi-Whip and has an Ani DiFranco tattoo
on his shin, come show me how a computer works.”
I think any writer
that uses a computer has at least one story of losing a day’s or even a work’s
week. There is no more hideous feeling. We all know the cardinal rule – back
up, back up, back up but somehow mistakes happen. (I save my manuscript in two places and at
the end of each day email it to myself as well. I figure my lap top and memory
sticks could break down but I can always access my email.)
Journalist Robert
Fulford has told a story of an “American novelist who switched on his computer
one morning and discovered to his horror that the fifty thousand words he’d
spent months writing had simply vanished. When he tried to recover them, happy
faces invaded his screen. Enraged, he punched a wall and broke his knuckles.”
Would I go back to
a manual typewriter? Never. But I try to stay on the good side of my computer!
Favourite Kid’s
Book of the Week:
Turtle in
Paradise by Jennifer Holm
The opening drew
me in: “Everyone thinks children are as sweet as Necco Wafers but I’ve lived
long enough to know the truth. Kids are rotten. The only difference between
grown-ups and kids is that grown-ups go to jail for murder. Kids get away with
it.”
Who could resist
reading more?
Amazon: In Jennifer L.
Holm's New York Times bestselling, Newbery Honor winning middle grade
historical fiction novel, life isn't like the movies. But then again,
11-year-old Turtle is no Shirley Temple. She's smart and tough and has seen
enough of the world not to expect a Hollywood ending. After all, it's 1935 and
jobs and money and sometimes even dreams are scarce. So when Turtle's mama gets
a job housekeeping for a lady who doesn't like kids, Turtle says goodbye
without a tear and heads off to Key West, Florida to live with relatives she's never
met. Florida's like nothing Turtle's ever seen before though. It's hot and
strange, full of rag tag boy cousins, family secrets, scams, and even buried
pirate treasure! Before she knows what's happened, Turtle finds herself coming
out of the shell she's spent her life building, and as she does, her world
opens up in the most unexpected ways. Filled with adventure, humor and
heart, Turtle in Paradise is an instant classic both boys and girls
with love.
