The Effect of Writing Tools on Writing

The Internet is chockablock full of essays on how the typewriter changed everything, including this recent book review of The Typewriter Century: A Cultural History of Writing Practices.

It certainly changed business and industry. First the typewriter, then the word processor, also changed the nature of writing.

I like to show off the fact that I know that Mark twain wrote the first American novel written on a typewriter: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Since the day Twain pulled the last piece of paper from his platten, the argument has raged: does the typewriter facilitate writing or degrade it?

Famously, Woody Allen drafts all his screen plays by hand. That would drive me insane. I can think at 2 to 3 times the speed that I can write by hand; I can type roughly as fast as I can think.

I started using a typewriter when I was 12 years old; I used it to write my 300 page novel Vernon Jones Super Scientific Detective on my mother’s portable typewriter over the summer, causing carpal tunnel syndrome. The only known treatment for the then-unnamed condition was to put my arm in a sling for a month. Thank goodness I didn’t have a serious case.

I know some writers disparage both the typewriter and the word processor on the grounds that they reduce the thinking and rewriting parts of the prose creation process.

Certainly the revisions are less obvious. In journalism, you often spend half your time writing the first paragraph, a.k.a. the lede, and the rest of your time writing the rest of the story. I used to average a half-dozen sheets of paper for every new story I wrote. But I welcomed the word processor with open arms.

I can confidently state that the thinking and re-writing portions of my writing process were unaffected by the word processor. Virtually all of my writing has been a stream of consciousness first draft, rewritten only in the sense of corrected. I don’t outline. Often, I don’t even know my endpoint.

Now that I have begun writing poetry, I no longer disbelieve writers who say they begin a project not knowing where it will end up. In the case of about half the hundred poems I have written in the last year, I began with an idea and allowed the poem to lead me to its natural conclusion. I no longer find such statements pretentious; I find them factual.

I have never outlined, and it is too late now. Plus, thanks to the joys of retirement and the Internet, it is extremely rare that I have to write more than 750 words on anything. Feature stories and long-term projects were always my least favorite part of journalism, the part I don’t miss.

Just as the pandemic made bad marriages worse and good marriages better, I believe the word processor made bad writers worse and good writers better.

Comments

[Robert E. Malchman]

The word processor is, unquestionably, an unalloyed good for writing. Writing is thinking, and thinking is writing. The first draft should be everything in your brain, not an edited selection before it gets to the page/screen. It's much harder to add to a draft than to pare down -- it's sculpting marble from a block, not clay from a lump. If you make a mistake editing mentally, it's much harder to go back and fix it, than if you put something useless down on the page/screen. The latter will scream out at you on revision; the former can end up being a hunt for a needle in haystack of words.

I would tell my legal writing students, "Get everything out on the first draft. Don't worry about the page limit. Don't worry about being overinclusive of arguments, facts, authorities. Vomit it all out on to the screen, and then go around and clean it up. There is no good writing; there is only good rewriting, and the word processor is the greatest boon to rewriting, ever.