Type Slowly

“For those of us who’ve spent all or much of our writing lives in the era of personal computers, it’s sometimes hard to fathom the drudgery (and delegation) that went into the production of pre-digital books.”

“In his new study, Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, Matthew G. Kirschenbaum is especially concerned with how word processing has changed the embodied labor of writing — its actual tasks, tools, and physical demands — and with how literary writers have embraced, resisted, and interpreted that transformation.”

“The phrase “word processing” wasn’t coined with literary elegance in mind. It originally applied to a range of technologies and practices, including typewriters, that allowed for delayed inscription, a shift from oral to recorded dictation, copiers, and a restructuring of office domains.”

“This wasn’t just a pitch to invest in the latest offering from IBM, but a call for major operational reform toward the unprecedentedly productive office of the future. “Just as magnetic tape, cartridges, and disks quickly rendered the friction of the eraser obsolete in correcting errors,” Kirschenbaum writes, “other kinds of intra-office friction — the ‘personal vagaries’ alluded to by the AMA […] — would be eliminated by making the typing secretary into a kind of removable media herself.””

“This was all very well for the business world, but the potentially alienating effects of such efforts ran counter to the Romantic ideas of composition to which writers still pledged nominal allegiance. “For the literati,” Kirschenbaum writes, “word processing was invariably burdened (not buoyed) by the associations carried by the gerund in that compound term, which could function as a foil for nothing less than humanity itself.””

“To many, word processing seemed to promise a new possibility for aesthetic perfection. “Perfect” was the leading marketing keyword, found in ad copy and in product names such as WordPerfect, Letter Perfect, and Perfect Writer, and more than a few novelists greeted the mantra as something more than hype.”

“If, in one traditional view, literary perfection was either illusory or the province of poems and other short works, now, it seemed, even a long novel could be refined to an apotheosis of unalterable integrity.”

“To others, word processing’s advantages had to do precisely with its return, after the relentlessly linear typewriter, to the flexibility of longhand: writing on a computer felt something like flipping through a notebook, scrawling a bent arrow from one paragraph to the next, filling a page with proofreaders’ marks without actually making the marks.”

“If you write and edit in a single ever-changing document, the (elusive) path toward perfection is one in which the finished work, as Kirschenbaum writes, “bears no visible trace of its prior history; indeed, it is as though the document did not have a history, but rather emerged, fully formed in its first and final iteration, from the mind of the author.””

“In the era of word processing, the ideal of multiple drafts, once so important to the literary writer’s amour propre, has for many of us become something of an abstraction.”

“But, more than that, I didn’t know how or why I would properly enumerate my drafts. In writing novels, essays, and stories, I’ve often enough changed a document’s title, printed it out, created a new document of excised material, or otherwise left a draft-like trail — and there are notebooks, index cards, and other artifacts awaiting a water-heater mishap in my basement. But, for the most part, writing on a word processor is a constant braid of composition, revision, and erasure. The text looks instantly professional, feels infinitely provisional.”

“On a word processor I often revise compulsively and carelessly: it’s diverting and self-flattering to make endless little supposed improvements to sentences, but if I make the wrong choice, there’s always, it seems, another chance to get it right. (Until there isn’t.)”

“Word processing, Kirschenbaum argues,

emerges as a combination of the indefinite suspension of inscription and the allure of real-time editorial intervention […]. In effect, the writing surface becomes a Möbius strip, with the writer both writing and not-writing at the same time — which is to say, writing in multiple locations simultaneously, one text made of light and another stored indefinitely prior to printing onto yet another (even more durable) surface.”

“This seems right: by some measure, for example, we’re in an extended period of over-fastidious attention to sentence construction that must have something to do with computers; by another, we’re in the ungainly middle of an anti-style period that must have something to do with computers.”

“To further complicate such questions, most writers, maybe more than ever, employ catch-as-catch-can methods and technology. They do so even for relatively undemanding projects. To write this review, for instance, I took notes in the book itself, composed a few early sentences in my head while chopping a salad, drafted roughly half the piece longhand on a legal pad, wrote and revised the rest on Microsoft Word, checked my email for the 17th time that day, printed the more or less finished draft in order to note further revisions by hand, entered those changes while making a few more, repeated these last two steps, and sent the article off to an editor, who might follow a similarly mixed approach.”