Today, a computer is an indispensable tool for every writer. It allows you to crank out more text in a much shorter time and, above all, to rewrite your prose and your poetry again and again very easily.
The great writers and poets of past ages had to content with quills, ink, pencils and paper which are slow and cumbersome to use and not inexpensive.
How would these intellectual giants have benefited if they had access to a modern personal computer and a word processor (with all features, i. e. spell checking, thesaurus, outline view, word counter etc.)?
Would they have been able to produce significantly more novels, plays and poems? Would “War and Peace” be a couple of Hundred pages longer than it already is? Would Shakespeare’s sonnets be even more sophisticated and brilliant than they already are?
As someone who has made his living writing, I can say that the tool has very little impact on the quality or quantity of my output. I started out on a typewriter, have used PCs, laptops, notebooks. Large swathes of stuff I’ve had published was scrawled out in notebooks or on scraps of paper.
Shakespeare, of course, wrote for the stage rather than for publication. He (or his actors) might well have appreciated the ability to make changes to the script and just print out a fresh copy for everyone. Although I don’t know how spellcheck would have worked in an era when spelling wasn’t standardized.
There are even today writers who prefer to write by hand, with pen on paper.
(And wasn’t there one famous writer who dictated his work to a team of scribes? Or am I thinking of the mathematician Euler?)
“What if?” questions typically don’t have definite, factual answers, and they often show up in Great Debates. This one in particular seems to belong in Cafe Society.
In reviewing handwritten correspondence from ages past, people tended to choose their words very carefully. Even people who were borderline illiterate (as in, spelling and punctuation) demonstrate a tendency to be very precise about which word they wanted.
Probably not who you were thinking of, but Barbara Cartland was famous for this. She would dictate a book to her secretary, get a teacher to proof-read it, and send the manuscript to a publisher without even reading it. (relevant link)
On the other extreme, Roald Dahl was famous for writing all of his books by hand, using yellow Ticonderoga pencils and yellow legal paper, sat in a shed with a board on his lap. (relevant link)
Both of these writers managed to be very prolific without using typewriters, word processors or computers, even though they were available.
The big question is whether there would be more or fewer lost plays with computer technology. A question we can’t answer without knowing a lot more about Elizabethan backup practises, alas.
I’m sure Tolkien would have appreciated access to a word processor. He had to type out the whole of LotR when he’d finished the handwritten manuscript, as he couldn’t afford to hire a typist to do it for him. But there is nothing indispensable about computers as a writing tool, they are largely a convenience.
It has been said that word processors do to words what food processors do to food. Perhaps it is just as well that Shakespeare and others did not have them.
I guess it has to do with your individual preferences and what you are used to. There are people who think very thoroughly before they commit a word, a sentence or even a whole paragraph to paper.
For me, personally, that is not the way I work at all. I begin a sentence by writing a few words and immediately start editing, changing words, inserting words, deleting them immediately, starting all over again etc., all within a matter of seconds. When I was in school, written tests were always a nightmare and what I scribbled down on paper was rarely readable, even for myself.
So for me, the advent of word processors (or to be more precise: text editors like Vim which I use as I write these lines) was a real blessing.
The ability to polish every word without needing to rewrite the entire page might have slowed them down in the end. I know that it slows me and I’m no Tolstoy, but if I were then War and Peace would not be completed before the heat death of the universe. I believe it was Kelly Johnson who said when asked about designing the SR-71 with slide rules, “If we had a computer we’d still be designing that fuselage.”
To continue that hijack for a moment, I saw a bumper sticker once that said, “There comes a time in every project when you must shoot the engineers and start production.” Shakespeare was working against a deadline and I am not sure that a computer always helps.
