Vladimir Nabokov wrote standing up. He also composed entire novels on notecards he stored in shoe boxes. It’s hard to imagine how he ever managed to construct a coherent piece of prose, let alone masterworks that weren’t even in his native tongue.
If writing had to be done that way, I might have stuck with my original plan to be a drummer—they, at least, have the sense to remain comfortably seated throughout their careers. As a writing student long ago at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts, I ran into my first writerly conundrum: the cramped miseries of smearing ink the long-hand way when you scrawl with a hooked-over left hand. This quickly led to a preference for haiku.
Before long, the demand to produce typewritten manuscripts arrived. Maybe it’s true, maybe not, but it’s oft heard that the inventors of the standard QWERTY keyboard placed the most commonly used letters under the left hand to slow down typists who might outstrip the capabilities of early machines. Indeed, as I type these words, my left hand dances along furiously, while the right merely hops in for a click on occasion.
If not for that QWERTY keyboard, my ink-stained paw, indented with angry red lines from spiral notebooks, might have at last persuaded me to give up chasing the muse. Writing lines by hand may have been great for monks, but I’ve never ached for a weird circular haircut.
Australian Simon Haynes, software engineer and author of a science fiction comedy book series, Hal Spacejock, recently told me he faced the same thing: “My handwriting is lousy and I get cramp after a couple of pages. On PCs, I can type for hours on end.”
When PCs showed up, they bore strange promises of “word processing,” which sounded like a mysterious practice involving assembly lines full of punctuation, delivery trucks backing up to the docks to cart away adverbs. Intriguing. And now, of course, the art of handwriting is quickly dying, buried by the relentless button-pushing and texting that spews words out into the world at an alarming rate, achieving astounding quantity and questionable quality.
I am ambivalent about the changes wrought by the easy flow of words from brain to public view; faster rates of word delivery are not dependent on lengthy thought processes. Yet it’s clear in retrospect that my continuing as a writer was facilitated directly by the arrival of computer-based technology. Nowhere have I found that more true than in my ongoing attempt to write a novel.
Armed with an idea but little else, I had long wanted to tap the keys to a full realization of said idea. I’d even begun a few times, grinding to a halt a few thousand words in, bewildered. How does anyone make sense of so many pages, of the need to keep track of characters and subplots, let alone go about revising it all? I had no clue, and note cards in shoe boxes seemed like folly.
I finally went in search of software, figuring something had to be out there that would make the whole thing more feasible. This led me to something called yWriter, the brainchild of the aforementioned Haynes. Months of chasing the program’s daily word count feature led me to a gleaming new draft, a pile of words that resembled, to a suspicious degree, a novel.
I’ve embraced the notion that technology and I are pals of the first order. And I’ve duly thanked Mr. Haynes for his generosity—yWriter is freeware.
He devised the program to meet his own writing needs. “I used a regular word processor on the Atari ST,” Haynes said. “It saw me through uni[versity], where I had to write essays and short fiction, and I thought it would be suitable for novels as well.” But in 1999, when he returned to a novel he’d begun several years before, he found “the 25,000-word slab was impenetrable.”
So he created yWriter, which looks something like most people’s email programs, with a window of text, above it a list of the scenes in a chapter and beside it a side menu for chapters. Besides the bells and whistles, this basic interface makes sense of 25,000-word slabs in easy fashion.
As a software engineer, he created yWriter with programming in mind: “It’s based on the environment used when building computer programs,” Haynes said. “I can select chapter five, then drag and drop the third scene onto chapter two. It takes about two seconds.”
For better or worse, that kind of working environment has become intuitive for those of us who spend lots of time with computers.
All this raises questions, of course—how does such technology change the end result? Are novels the product of many more revisions than they were in the days of ink ribbons? Have our brains grown less accustomed to baking an idea until it rises? How long will it be until someone writes a novel of Tweets? Is that a bad thing?
Because after all, Nabokov, with his preference for note cards, would have been a natural.