Chained to the keys

I recently had to write the final section of a book. It wasn’t very long — 500 words or so, about half the length of this article — and an imminent train journey seemed the ideal opportunity. No laptop accompanying me, but that didn’t matter: as an exercise in nostalgia I would write the words in longhand. The words, however, refused to appear. The paper stayed defiantly blank. It dawned on me that I can no longer write except on computer.

Virtually every writer I know, or know of, is the same. As so often, technology has first liberated and then enslaved. Fetishisation of the writing process is nothing new — in previous eras inspiration would depend on a particular typewriter, or a certain fountain pen on a certain grade of paper. But both those forms implied a permanence once words had been written. What the computer has introduced is a total ease of rewriting. Some authors straddle the ages; Michael Ondaatje writes by pen then literally cuts and pastes, with scissors and tape. For most, though, words require Word.

It’s a disturbing thought, especially for those of us who finished university in the early 1990s, just before word processors became common. We associate intellectual rigour with handwritten (or possibly typed) essays. But were those essays as good as they could have been? Didn’t the difficulty of rewriting hold us back? That final polish, so easy to achieve now, went by the board, replaced with a sighed ‘Nah, that’ll do’. Not for us the rigour of P.G. Wodehouse, who as he finished each page would pin it to the wall at a height indicating its quality. Low-lying ones were reworked, the aim being to get everything up to the picture rail.