“That’s not writing, that’s typing,” is the criticism Truman Capote famously levelled at Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. Each to their own. That the finished novel was a single sheaf (“The Scroll” as he called it) taped together by his wife, Joan Haverty, then fed into the typewriter, is of more interest to me in this post because that’s a hell of a way to work by anyone’s measure. A three week final draft in one shot (before that session, the novel took nine years from the first road trips and notebook scribbling) bashed out on a hundred and twenty-foot scroll of tracing paper cut to size and taped together. Just to piss off potential publishers, he typed single-spaced and without margins or paragraph breaks.

I used a typewriter for a while, and then I got my first computer. Typing seemed fraught with danger because every time you screwed up, correction fluid or the erase ribbon were the only alternatives. Neither were satisfactory which meant that the page would have to be re-done at some point, perhaps only because of one offending keystroke. Switching to a computer, no mistake was permanent. Equally, cut and paste allowed you to think in scenes more easily and move passages around at random. Cuts could be squirrelled on files within folders inside other folders which meant that nothing was ever completely dead: just slowly sinking deeper into the hard drive until one day the computer died and it was put out of its misery. Mistakes could also lead to moments of great prose — an unintended paste that created an interesting juxtaposition that you would never have planned, for example.

The downside to this wonderful tool is that publishers/agents expect a manuscript to have gone through countless drafts before being presented to them. It’s easier to work now than in the past, so raise the bar, I presume, is the rationale. They will also tell you that it’s harder to sell to publishers and that readers are more demanding now than any time in the past. But can a manuscript be overproduced — edited, re-edited, cut and pasted until the original spark has been hammered out of it? This is a difficult question. Popular wisdom is that Ulysses or On The Road (to name but two) would never be published today. That’s a pointless argument: it’s subjective for a start and, in addition, something akin to time travel — if Marty McFly dates his own mother then how can he be born? I’d say that without exception manuscripts improve with each draft and anything that survives from the first draft has damn well earned the right to still be there. However, if I had to take a punt about the the next book to blow away readers with its risks and style, a rough diamond, flawed but jaw droppingly original, then I’d say it will come from the world of self publishing and not through mainstream channels.

As new tools change working methods, old skills are lost. Obviously the ability to re-write ad-infinitum means there’s less pressure on a first draft, so a writer will work differently from someone who knows that it’s a major headache to move passages around and can’t click undo if they don’t like it. But does that extra pressure create extra focus? Hard to say. During the late nineties, broadcast quality digital film had a similar effect on cinematography. Film stock is expensive; lab time is expensive; time is expensive. Being able to review the shot on set and re-shoot is convenient and old skills about shot planning and predicting light became less important. Strangely, producers grumbled that scenes were taking too much time, which equates to more money, because crews had lost their focus. Conversely, filmmakers could experiment on set more freely with some unexpected results.

As with all things creative, it depends on the individual and sometimes, the individual project. Some people write out an entire book by hand and then type it out. I can’t imagine doing that, but if it works; don’t change it. Despite lacking the literary mystique of the typewriter and, despite itself being an antique, the word processor is a fantastic tool that I’ll use lovingly until they invent a machine to extract thoughts directly from my head.