Authors Electric

In the olden days (when I started writing) paper accumulated like snowdrifts on shelves, in corners, on table-tops and work surfaces. Those of us who went to college had no office training whatsoever, and filing was something you did to your nails. Typing up handwritten copy was time-consuming and fraught with mistakes which had to be Tippexed over, as none of us could touch-type. Everything had to be carbon copied, and manuscripts frequently got mislaid or completely lost. It’s so different now. You can save draft after draft (as long as you remember to name them correctly) and the storage capacity of a home computer or laptop exceeds any amount of shelving that Ikea can fit into a home office. You can change the name of a character throughout a book with just a few key-strokes. And you should hang on to all these drafts, as cyberspace is searchable and flicking through page after page after page to find that one paragraph is a thing of the past. So why should you turn into a virt...

I remember the old days, when I used to write everything in longhand, and then type it up on a manual typewriter with a sheet of carbon paper underneath, sometimes even two, and the Tippex at my elbow. A mistake often meant re-typing the whole of a chapter, and editing was literally a cut-and-paste job, which could get both messy and confusing. You posted something off with your heart in your mouth, as your top copy was the only one worth sending out. The photocopy shop charged by the sheet, and the expense was prohibitive.             Then along came the ZX81, with its little silver strip of printout paper, followed by the Spectrum. And then, suddenly, there were Amstrads and Amigas and a revolution had taken place. Writers had deep philosophical conversations about whether writing straight onto a computer somehow hi-jacked the creative process, and whether our work would be the worse for it. And then along came PCs and Apple ...