Writing - thirty years of word-processing!

There’s an interesting article about the 30-year anniversary of the Amstrad word-processor in the Guardian here.

Like many a writer of long tooth, I used the first Amstrad word-processor with Locoscript and its dot-matrix printer, to write short stories and novels and ultimately a short story magazine, Auguries here.

 

Before that, I used a Remington portable typewriter, which travelled with me in my naval career. Having self-taught myself to touch-type, I improved my speed in the Royal Navy, which proved useful ever after.

There are plenty of authors who prefer writing in long-hand, and there’s nothing wrong with that, though it is quite laborious. There’s supposed to be this physical-mental symbiosis between mind and hand when wielding the pen. I imagine there can be; but it is no more immediate than fingers dancing across a keyboard almost as fast as thought.

I don’t think it’s apocryphal: I read somewhere that Frederick Forsyth buys himself an old-fashioned typewriter before he embarks on a new book. Of the old school. I remember those sit-up-and-beg mighty machines; you could train for the Olympics, simply by working the carriage return. And the rough Atlantic Ocean played havoc with typing, as the ratchet slipped during a prodigious swell.

I may be nostalgic about those times, but no, I don’t miss retyping entire books, carbon copies, ink rubbers, correcting fluid and Tipp-ex.

I eventually migrated on to a PC and purchased a PC-compatible Locoscript application, because there were many features I liked, and I wasn’t so keen on WordPerfect. That meant that eventually I could migrate all my written work to future PCs, which saved a lot of retyping. [Sad sign of the times, my spell-checker doesn’t recognise ‘Locoscript’…!]

Thirty years? Blimey. They went fast.

‘Don’t misquote me’

We are all liable to misquote from time to time, whether that’s due to a faulty memory, using a suspect source or from pure laziness.

Currently going the rounds on Facebook is a quotation from Isaac Asimov: 'If my doctor told me I have six minutes to live, I’d type faster.’

Amusing, and typical of the prolific Asimov. But it is patently wrong.

As a scientist, Asimov wouldn’t say that because – a) no doctor would give anybody just six minutes; 2) no matter how fast you type, you couldn’t achieve much in six minutes.

The actual (if less pithy) quotation was: ‘If my doctor told me I had only six months to live, I wouldn’t brood, I’d type a little faster.’

 

Isaac Asimov - Wikipedia commons

Asimov knew all about fast production. He would write up to eighteen hours a day. Typing 90 words a minute, he could clock up about 50 pages a day. He said, ‘Thinking is the activity I love best, and writing to me is simply thinking through my fingers.’ He let nothing interfere with his concentration. How he would have coped with social media is a moot point, perhaps, but he did say ‘You could put on an orgy in my office and I wouldn’t look up – well, maybe once.’ I can imagine him saying that with an irrepressible twinkle in his eye.

To counter his argument for speed writing, he stated, ‘To write quickly and to write well are usually incompatible attributes, and if you must choose one over the other, you should choose quality over speed every time.’ I suspect the phrase ‘usually incompatible’ applies him, regarding his unusually prolific output.

The prerequisite for good writing is constant writing. Some writers have said you need to write a million words before you can become a writer, or words to that effect! Certainly, beginning writers need to write, write and write some more. Asimov said, ‘It’s the writing that teaches you. It’s the rotten stories that make it possible for you to write the good stories eventually.’ [My italics].

There’s one other requirement for writing: ‘The one absolute requirement for me to write,”’ Asimov said, ‘is to be awake.’ In other words, he lived for his writing. And it served him well; he published in excess of 300 short stories and 500 books. With regard to style and characterisation, he wasn’t a great writer – but he was a very popular author, with books in 9 out of the 10 major categories in the Dewey Decimal Classification; no mean feat.

 

Isaac Asimov - 1920-1992