Typewriter Versus Word Processor

I had a thought last night. I have a lot of them. Most aren’t worth much. I’m not sure this new thought is either. I’m sure it’s not original. Maybe everyone has had it. But I haven’t seen it written down.

It begins with something Lana told me. She was contrasting her strategy for taking photos back in the ‘film’ days with the digital world of today. She said that with film, because of the cost and inconvenience, she tended to take few pictures and spend much more time framing each to try and make them good. With digital she doesn’t do much of this. She takes ‘lots’ of pictures, downloads them to her computer, and then weeds out the good from the worthless. Digital pictures are cheap to take and don’t need “development” time.

It occurred to me that something similar has happened with writing as we moved from the typewriter era into the computer/word processing era. I’m old enough to have written on a typewriter. I wrote college essays and papers on an electric. I wrote some stories and poems, and even a novel that will never see the light of day. I used my first word processor in graduate school and that is when my writing really took off.

Writing with word processing software makes it easy to generate lots and lots of words, then go through and weed out those that don’t work. I spent much more time thinking about the words I was going to use back when I wrote on a typewriter because I didn’t want to go through the arduous process of correcting and rewriting. I also typed slower and more carefully to avoid errors that would have to be corrected.

These days, I slather words down and do a lot of my thinking on the screen. I try out all different ways of saying things. I often end up saving several drafts of stories, those that are close to finished, or those that have variant endings. I like having these and sometimes go back later and think I chose the wrong ending for one I sent out. I also continue to rewrite stories even long after they're done. I save the published version as is, but I may still revise words, sentences, paragraphs and endings. 

Computer word processing software has allowed me to do this, and without it I’m sure I’d have no writing career at all. I also know, though, that the ease of writing on a computer can be a trap. A lot of the words that go down easily aren’t the right words in the right combinations. There’s still a lot of work to be done weeding out the good from the bad. In that process is where the art lies. 

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LEADEN

I love a good story but I also love lyrical prose. Lyrical is the right word because prose has a sound to me. It’s not quite poetry but it has a musical element. In the hands of a master, it sings.

Consider: “See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He strokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches him.” (Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian)

Or: “The battle in the meadowlands of the Euphrates was over, but not the slaughter. On that bloody field...the steel-clad bodies lay strewn like the drift of a storm. The great canal men called the Nile, which connected the Euphrates with the distant Tigris, was choked with the bodies of the tribesmen, and survivors were panting in flight toward the white walls of Hilla, which shimmered in the distance above the placid waters of the nearer river.” (Robert E. Howard, “The Lion of Tiberias”)

Very different language, and yet both are beautiful to me. I always strive to make my prose sound good as well as be functional, although it is not easy to achieve. I also believe the sound of the prose should match the content of the story. A horror tale will have different music to it than a fantasy. I believe fantasy in particular lends itself to beautiful prose, because fantasy generally requires much more description than horror fiction does.

So, I read a lot of fantasy, in hopes of getting a fix of both great story and beautiful writing. Then I come upon something like this:

“More important, if he could but grasp the language, what was the strange power this woman had? ‘You have strange powers,’ Zanthar said.”

And then: “The love-life?” Zanthar questioned. He did not understand the term. In fact, he was not at all certain that he understood a tenth of the words she used. “I do not understand.” 

Repetition ad nauseam seems to be this author’s stock in trade. The repetition of “strange power(s)” and of “understood” are just killers here to any music these phrases may have had. Not to mention the far from pithy dialogue, which simply restates exactly what the writer has just told the reader in narrative. This is the very illustration of “leaden” prose.

One guess who this author is.  If you read my last post, it’s the same guy. Robert Moore Williams. I was gonna give up on this book but have decided to continue on. I think I can milk a few more blog posts out of it. I can only hope no one will ever find my own writing so worthy of this type of exploration. I’d much rather be compared with McCarthy and Howard.

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