Technology and Process

Technology changes the way we work.

Everybody knows this, but there is nothing quite like having your Internet go out to bring it home to you. Last week’s infrastructure failure made me think about how my writing process has changed over time.

I started my first book in 7th grade, handwritten in pencil in a school notebook. Until I went off to college (with a shiny new typewriter), everything I wrote started with pen and paper – first, because that was all I had; later, because the only typewriter in the house was my mother’s, which required making arrangements to use (and anyway, it wasn’t portable).

Once I learned to type, I made arrangements to use Mom’s typewriter fairly often, but I wasn’t writing on it. I was transcribing the nearly-illegible work I did in the school lunchroom, in study hall, and in class (when I could get away with it). My handwriting isn’t bad most of the time, but when I get on a roll it hits “barely legible” pretty fast, which isn’t helped by my tendency to invent abbreviations and leave out words in order to get things down on paper before they evaporate out of my brain. If I transcribe it within a day and a half, I’m fine; past that, it gets more and more difficult to figure out what I actually meant by “G wntup lkd? Frn Go said.”

My first typewriter was a portable Olivetti manual – meaning, not electric, and more properly “lugable” than “portable.” I couldn’t type terribly fast on it, because going fast meant typos, and every typo meant a tedious process of erasing with a rubber “typewriter eraser” and then brushing the eraser crumbs carefully out of the way so they didn’t foul the keys or the typewriter ribbon. Liquid “white out” and the little chalk correction sheets help the correction process some, but it was still enough of a pain that I slowed down in order to keep from having to do it so often. So I was still composing almost entirely in handwritten notebooks.

That changed when my younger brother offered to loan me his electric, cartridge-ribbon typewriter. I still used notebooks for writing on my lunch hour at work (and in other scraps of available time), but when I got home and transcribed them, I usually kept going for at least another page. I developed a process whereby I’d draft an incredibly sloppy illegible mess of  scribbles in the lunchroom, then come home and type it in with tiny margins and 1-1/2 line spacing (enough for me to fit changes in between lines, but still allowing me to fit more lines on the page before I had to stop writing and change the paper). I’d take the newly-transcribed pages with me in my notebook next day and add scribbles and corrections and arrows, then come home and cut the page apart and tape the new bits in place. When I’d expanded a standard 8-1/2 x11″ page to about 18 or 20 inches and the tape started pulling and ripping, I’d bite the bullet and retype. I usually got four pages out of “one page” of this Frankenstein’s manuscript.

I think it was 1978 when I got my first computer – an Apple II+ with 64K of memory and a floppy disk drive. It didn’t display lower-case letters or paragraph indentations, though the printout was fine. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. No more Frankenstein manuscripts; I could fix typos and move paragraphs around easily without having to retype everything!

Since then, computers and word processors have gotten more powerful and more complex. You’d think this was an inarguably good thing, but…

But somewhere in the late 1980s, I started noticing something I refer to as “word processor errors.” A sentence or a paragraph that appears twice in the same chapter because I copied it, pasted it, and forgot to erase the original. Sentences that read “He started returned back to the house” because I didn’t erase one verb when I decided to replace it with a different one. Search-and-replace errors, like renaming a character from “Rant” to “Merrit” and discovering too late that the manuscript was now full of “immegMerrit,” people talking about their “research gMerrit,” and characters Merriting about their dissatisfaction with the situation. Consistency problems resulting from moving a scene from Chapter 10 to Chapter 2 without also moving the setup/background that made it comprehensible. Spell-check problems with homonyms. I had to adapt my writing process to include a final pass (sometimes more than one) to check for and fix these problems…which I never had back when “moving a paragraph” meant physically slicing the page apart and taping things back together in a new order, and then retyping it.

I think the biggest actual change in my process is that somewhere in the last twenty years or so, I not only stopped making handwritten drafts, I stopped printing out the rough copy to edit. Normally, this doesn’t create a lot of problems, but when the power goes out, it’s a different story. I can’t just grab a pen and keep working without a copy of what I’m working on. If the laptop isn’t up-to-date and charged, I have a problem. If the Internet is out, I’m constantly having to curb my automatic look-up reflex as I write, because I can’t double-check the exact dates of the Battle of Waterloo with a couple of keystrokes. Fact-checking-as-I-go becomes an interruption instead of part of the process – I have to get up and check a reference book.

I’m also much less resistent to making changes at any stage of the manuscript, because tweaking a work here and a sentence there no longer means an hour of painstaking retyping. I try not to take this to extremes, though; I’ve known several authors who seem unable to let go of their work even after it’s published, and keep polishing and tweaking words and phrases as if they could drag their entire oeuvre up to their current skill level by sheer persistence. I know myself well enough to realize that if I tried that, it would very quickly become a sophisticated form of new-writing avoidance.

None of these things feel like a major change…but then, my process has been adjusted incrementally over the last fifty years. Comparing what I’m doing this year to how I worked last year or three years ago, the changes are hard to see. Looking at the longer time frame, my current writing process would be very nearly unrecognizable to the pre-teen scribbling stories in her school notebook.