Look ma, no computer - writing without a word processor

by Sally Tisdale

I'VE COME TO THINK OF IT AS THE MICRO

wave problem. When people ask me why I don't write on a Computer, I often find myself explaining by way of the microwave absent from kitchen. It's not that I don't wish for the obvious con venience of either tool. It's that I'm too aware of the price of that convenience, and money is only a small part of it.

The virtues of creative writing on a computer have bee extolled to me by many people, often in long, rambling dot-matrix letters on computer paper, the choppy words barely grey against the serrated pages. Crossreferencing, indexing, deletion and insertion in a few moments' time: a writer's dream. The elimination of a certain drudgery at the heart of writing, a built-in organization. Streamlined. Clear-cut. Simple.

I had owned a Smith-Corona electric typewriter for many years, and found it a delightful thin& as any good tool can be: doing exactly, and only, what it was designed to do, never needing repair, simple to operate, accepting of mild abuse. It had no fat. But I finally began to outwrite it; my self-taught, six-fingered typing had finally grown too fast for the old-fashioned type bar keys to handle. It was time to shop around.

I found myself feeling a little guilty, out of step, without a computer. I'd heard nothing but good about them, and in spite of gulping at the prices, found the idea appealing. I'm no stranger to the delight of technical competence, that gleeful pleasure in feeling my fingertips in control, managing a complex machine. Computers looked sleek, clean, fun. I was tired of cut-andpaste, manila folders full of torn notes, alphabetizing reference lists by hand.

I gave it a try, revising chapters of a book. So neat, so quick - no blurry tape borders, no mismatched margins or troublesome cutting. Just keys and tiny arrows and sudden electron bursts of words appearing and disappearing across the screen. just me alone and in charge of the small, shining, framed world of my own writing, newborn and true. I was, I thought, writing very well. The shimmery green blocks of type looked so important, so complete, so publishable. I spent many hours seduced by the machinery, trying to ignore the slow shift of kinetic pages. My words were fine words, and in the same instant of wanting to continue refining them forever, I found them just perfect as they were.

It was only later I saw them clearly. I had to fiddle with a messy printer, and tear hair over a chapter missing (and, it turned out gone forever) in the electronic void. I saw the run-on sentences and misguided thoughts, the digression and lack of clarity of any first draft. That green screen could have made the alphabet look good. It blindfolded my writer's eye. Sabotage.

I had become friends with a man who couldn't write personal lefters without a computer, whose time-period reference frame had shrunk to seconds. He spent his time chasing obsolescence, trying to whip the chronic ignorance in a changing technology. His letters went on and on, streams not so much of consciousness as of association. His lefters, much of what I read in magazines, my own error in judgement about my work: I could see the computer as a toady, a flatterer. So much of writing is self-conscious - self-referencing. I need the critic of my own scribbled comments and crossedout phrasings as much as I need an editor.

It has taken me painful years of writing to learn the single most important lesson of the craft: revision. A writer's task is at least as much to withhold as to tell.

It requires paring away what is not necessary almost more than revealing what matters. This is the secret to illumination: carefully cast shadows, the proper emphasis of line and angle. This isnever easy; our words are all we have, our babies, and vastly significant in their labored appearance. Part of my work is figuring out what portion of that might be significant to anyone else.

I have learned over ten years that a first draft often looks nothing like the final one. Throwing out is almost always hard, and almost always good; sometimes I keep little more than a word or phrase. The computer screen plays an insidious trick on that process - it makes each word look done, Those flickering letters, so participatory and alive, look already set in type. Printed, beyond change.

There is more than appearance here. The computer seems to interrupt a process. It lends a false importance to the individual (called, so admiringly, the operator) - and to the page itself at the expense of a breadth of vision. It actually interrupts the process of vision, of seeing thoughts become notes and evolve into a story, and only very eventually into type and print. The drudgery of writing is not an unfortunate thing, but writing itself, essential, the heart. Drudgery is a matter of attention to detail in the service of the whole.

This is the heart of the microwave problem. They make immediate what has always been slow, what had seemed to be slow by its nature. That's why people love them and why I find them so irresistible when around. Ah, speed. And why, health concerns and curious little minds aside, I won't buy one. Microwaves make fast what should be slow, a process of preparation and consideration and savor Good cooking requires as much paring down and parcelling out of the unnecessary as good writing. Why in the world would I want to circumvent that process? My goal in cooking is not simply food, but good food well and carefully prepared. There is something weak and unfinished about microwave food; hot, but not crunchy; cooked, but not done. I like the crunch and bite of slow-roasted meals, and I want crunch and bite and deliberation in my writing.

So how do I write? I want typing speed, if not speed in preparation. I want ease in correction, but not ease of revision - the ability to catch and correct spelling errors, typographical mistakes. My compromise is a tentative step forward into the brave new world, but with lin-tits. I bought another Smith-Corona, an XD7000 electronic, and moved from type bars to a daisy wheel for speed, and a four-word crystal display for catching errors (and the ability to type directly when I want, as I often do). My words are still in my hands. It cost me less than $400, has needed no repair, and even seems able to take a little abuse. This machine should last me for years, and the software never changes.

A Writer's Time

There I was with a nice advance from a New York publisher to write a book, and there was only one tiny problem, which I did not discuss with the publisher I'd never written a book and didn't know how I knew how to write, to edit, even to publish, but authoring? Help!

Help come in the form of a little book (read it in an evening; read it again the next evening) that speited out precisely the task at hand: how to write a book. I got innumerable good things from Atchity's counsel, but the main three probably were these:

* Time is everything in the labor of writing. Organize your time, and the writing will have a chance to organize itself I used most of Atchity's tips except the taking of many mini-vacations (I didn't have time).

* Use 5 x 8 cards! Salvation. Every idea, every separable quote, every item from Me literature I was researching, each went onto its own card. Organizing the eventual 1,800 cards into piles was defining the chapters; subpiles defined the sections; sequence within the subpiles defined the sequence of the day's writing. This was THE handle without which I would have floundered for months.

* Define in a sentence what the book is about. Searching for that sentence organizes your thinking; using it organizes your writing. Revising consists of removing everything that isn't in support of that sentence. In my case (The Medic Lab, 1987, Viking) The sentence was a quote,

"How will we directly connect our nervous systems to the global computer?"

If this review sounds like a burble of gratitude, that's because it is. -Stewart Brand