Sans Fig Leaf

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"Another man's poison..."

12 September, 2002

Many years ago I was a staunch oponent of computer word processors. I had a long list of logical reasons why the manual typewriter was a superior tool for the serious author. Electric typewriters were okay for the experienced writer, and were certainly superior for clerical and stenographic purposes, but a manual was where a serious writer should learn his or her craft.

Some of my friends laughed at me. Today, since I clearly use word processors, page layout programs, and similar products, many people leap to the conclusion that I have abandoned all of those arguments and now see the folly of my earlier beliefs.

I don't. Each of those arguments was logical and true at the time, and they remain so today.

I don't want to go back to writing my stories on a manual typewriter, just as I don't want to go back to physically pasting-up long strips of typeset text to create books. But there are skills I learned doing things the hard way, which seem to be lacking in most younger people in my fields now. Which isn't to say that it isn't possible for writers to learn those skills without the manual typewriter. I mean, I learned about kerning and leading of type without having to spend years assembling movable type into individual lines of text. But I don't see many of today's writers learning the valuable lessons of the manual typewriter.

What lessons did the manual typewriter teach me? Well, first, there's my typing speed. Few keyboardists can hit and sustain 105 words per minute. I can. Sometimes when we get new employees, I've had them walk to my door from several offices away because they'd never, in their years experience in the technical writing field, heard a keyboard rattling away at that rate. I don't believe I would have ever reached this speed if I hadn't tried to get my old manual typewriter to keep up with the ideas zipping around in my head.

The manual typewriter also taught me the virtue of brevity. There's a lot of word bloat going on out there. While it's true that writers of previous centuries were capable of turning out extremely long texts, a lot of the longer novels being turned out today don't have nearly as many subplots or the complexity of, say, The Three Musketeers. But the real culprits are among the amateurs. And since tomorrow's professions will come from today's amateurs, they leave me a bit worried.

In the era of the manual typewriter very few people would type up dozens, let alone over a hundred pages, of text without coming up with some idea of what the ending of the story might be. Now I routinely hear from writers who do exactly this. Usually by the time they do figure out the plot, it turns out to be something that really only needed a short story to tell. But now they have tens of thousands of words written in which essentially random things happen to their main character without advancing the plot, and they don't want to abandon them.

The manual typewriter taught me the value of revision in advance. Some people refer to this as internal editing. Even when I'm typing at top speed, there's a part of my brain that is already thinking about the next page, and making decisions about what would work best in the next scene. By the time I actually type a paragraph, I've already imagined it and revised it at least once. The consequence of this is that the vast majority of my stories only need two drafts before they are final. Not all of them go that smoothly. I've had more than one story that I had to revise many more times, but usually my first draft is very close to the final product.

All of these things can be learned without a manual typewriter, it's true. It just seems to me that a lot of aspiring writers aren't learning them. Or are learning the lesson much more slowly than earlier generations did. I'm also well aware that there were undoubtedly, at the end of the 19th century, plenty of experienced writers who had noticed similar problems with young writers who used typewriters instead of writing things out long-hand.

Just as those writers were loathe to return to the quill and ink bottle, I don't want to go back to my trusty manual typewriter. I can write so much faster with the computer than I could with a typewriter. I do take advantage of the ability to move things around without having to retype pages or entire sections of a longer documents. The ability to search the text is simply divine. So, you can have my word processor when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.

But I long for the day when more writers discover the virtue of brevity.