On the other hand the royalties of “Invisible Man” had they run out after 14 years might have “encouraged” Ellison to produce his next work post-haste…which argues in favor of shorter terms of monopoly protection even for the fine artists of the literary world.

Back 30 years or so ago, Lester del Rey (no fan of computers in writers’ lives) told me that there are some writers who get computers to write, and some who get computers to play with the computers. This is a distinction that makes sense to me.

And there are theories advanced that postulate that writing with the hand, physically shaping each glyph as if you were drawing it, involves parts of the brain that play no part in pressing a key. And therefore there is a differenct quality of writing that emerges from longhand MSS vs. typescripts whether from typewriters or word processors.

But I would not wish to give up my Scrivener for the Mac!

For myself, I learned to touch type in high school, before anyone had personal computers (I’m dating myself, aren’t I?). I first got my hands on a computer in 1980 and have owned and used many of them ever since. Although there was a lot of time spent on just “playing” with the computer, even in the early days, I realized that a word processing program was the most useful software to have.

With all this exposure to computers, I very quickly got to the point that if I needed to write anything more than a few lines, I would use the computer. I found it much easier to compose on the computer, without ever writing anything on paper first. The thoughts just flowed more freely than with paper. Today, if I have to write anything of length on paper, it is a real chore.

I am reminded of Isaac Asimov, who for most of his career composed his stories at the typewriter, without a paper draft. In fact, usually his typewritten first draft was also the final draft. In his later life, he did switch to using a computer, but still wrote the same way he did on the typewriter. Considering the number of articles and books that he created, it obviously worked for him.

Wow, what a story, Joseph! Perhaps someday someone will come up with a program to help office workers be more efficient in their writing and be better at seeing the whole picture–rather than fixating on the details. But can you really do that to help a genius like Ellison with his work?

Of course, as we know, his computer wasn’t the only reason why we ran so late.

By the way, the Washington Post has just done a chat session on Ellison, and it’s well worth reading—complete with computer-related references, including this one from Adam Bradley: “As for the computer material, I would say that what it sometimes lacks in polish, it makes up for in the richness of the characters’ voices-particularly that of the jazzman turned preacher, Alonzo Hickman, who emerges as the governing voice of the novel.”

At the same time, Bradley says that “I believe that the computer has fundamentally transformed the way writers write and readers read. The implications are stylistic (shorter paragraphs, more disjointed narratives) but also practical (we can play games, surf the web, even participate in online chats!). Ellison might not have done all of those things on his computer–he couldn’t have–but it nonetheless was a radically different tool than the typewriter.”

Does anyone agree with the above? I’m not sure we can blame shorter paragraphs on computers; the culprit instead is the shortened attention span of modern readers, and in the case of the Web and e-books, then shorter could be better. As for disjointed narratives—well, that depends on how well you use computers. With easier revision, a conscientious writer could make the narrative flow better.

I speak first-hand, not from theory. I’ve been revising some old fiction from my Selectric days, and both the prose and the narrative are far, far better in the new version, not just because I know more about writing but also because I can revise more easily. I doubt I’ll be returning to a Selectric very soon.

What’s more, you can bet I prefer a 19-inch monitor to the midget screen on the Ellison’s Osborn, which perhaps made it harder to keep track of the book as a whole. This wouldn’t be so much a problem today. I can wander around a book-length manuscript just about as rapidly–in fact, probably more so due to the powers of search—as I could around a typewritten manuscript.

The other thing to keep in mind is that Ellison lacked a hard drive on the Osborn, which meant he had to swap disks in and out, and had more problems finding material than writer do when using a hard drive. My manuscript is one big Word file.

Thanks,
David

An aside to Carol: Thanks for your Osborne memories!

The idea was that instead of wrting a draft paper longhand, the software on the HP’s could be used, thus saving the engineer/scientist lots of time. It didn’t happen that way. Most of them would sit in front of the HP for hours or days, trying to get their “draft” into final form, before printing it out for the secretary to type into the Wang.

OTOH, this was still 14 years after Invisible Man. There is hardly any shortage of artists who score an initial work putting them on the map as geniuses only to then suffer from performance anxiety that prevents them from moving forward.

Presumably if he had live in a different era, Ellison would be on the dev team for Duke Nukem Forever.

As someone smart (or maybe it was Michael Crichton) once said, novels aren’t written, they’re rewritten. And word processors are rewriting machines.

The same people who once said they’d never abandon their typewriters now claim they’ll never abandon their paper books. Time has a way of making people forget.

I also think the third version adds the kind of emotional detail that connects the reader.

Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com