![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Last night, it occurred to me how grateful I was for the advent of modern word-processing. Because of my poor coordination and spastic fingers, I am constantly making typos, and because my brain moves faster than my fingers, I often leave out words. Thanks to the miracle of Word, I can remedy these mistakes with the press of a button. Not only that, but I can delete and rearrange text with a few clicks.
My first writing machine was an old IBM Selectric typewriter. It was a sophisticated bit of equipment at the time, bought by the school so that I could complete written assignments in a legible fashion. It even came with correction tape. It hummed loudly, and it sounded like a rock crusher when it "corrected" a mistake. I loved that machine, as did my poor teacher, who no longer had to torture his eyes in order to decipher my scrabble. My mother brought home a similar typewriter from work. Ostensibly, it was to do my homework on, but I spent a great deal more time recording the pictures in my head. Since I wasn't permitted to leave the house and had few friends with the time or the means to escape even if I were, I spent entire weekends clacking away at this old rolltop desk just off the living room. It smelled of ink and varnish, and the typewriter smelled of warm plastic. I was very young then, so those early stories were innocent stories about a TV show called Stingray. Since romance and sex weren't yet on my emotional radar, they were filled with car chases and dutiful recountings of what characters were wearing and what the protagonists were eating for breakfast. I remember a particularly breathless description of the hero's "runny eggs".
Sex and romance wouldn't make an appearance until two years later, and then in the guise of dreadful NKOTB h/c fic that featured a few fumbling kisses. I wouldn't write my first sex scene until I was almost fourteen, and even then, it was vague and horrible because I was a sheltered child whose only exposure to sex had been the under-cover fumblings of couples on primetime TV. Because I was disabled, it was assumed by everyone, including my mother, that not only would I never have sex, but I would never want sex or experience sexual urges. Thus, I was never given the Talk. The only sex education I received until adulthood and exposure to porn came from a nice but repressed Christian-school biology professor who told his sniggering charges all about "turgid penises", and the more worldly girls at the local Girls' Club. It wasn't until I saw my first porno at sixteen that I realized sex lasted longer than a minute.
Anyway, that wasn't my original point. My point was the old IBM Selectric. As great as it was, it had its limitations. While it could erase words as long as the correction tape worked, it couldn't move text. Nor could it go back and add lines. If I suddenly decided that one paragraph worked better above another rather than below it, the only remedy I had was to rip out the page, roll in a fresh piece of paper and retype the entire page. Depending on the magnitude of the changes, I had to retype several pages. It was laborious and frustrating. Sometimes I worked on the same pages for weeks just trying to correct all the mistakes and incorporate minor changes in position.
And even if all that were to my liking, there was still the problem of listing text. I could never get the paper to roll into the typewriter evenly, and as a consequence, most of my manuscripts looked as though they'd been banged out on a fishing trawler in the middle of a death roll. It drove me to distraction because I wanted it to look as neat and clean as it did in all the books I read. Plus, I had dreams of being a famous writer someday, and I thought that no one would read my books if they looked like they'd been written on a teeter-totter. I went through ridiculous amounts of paper in my pursuit of perfection, so much that my mother ordered me to start using both sides of the paper. You can imagine how well that went over. Between natural teenage melodrama and the heightened sense of suffocation that comes with being disabled and so reliant on others' better natures, it was The End of the World.
I thought of all this while I was writing last night, listening to music and effortlessly shifting lines within a paragraph and revising bits of dialogue. Changes that once took me hours and sheet after sheet of white paper were effected in mere seconds, freeing me to continue the story, to reveal more of the watercolor in my head. A highlight here, a drag-and-drop there, a backspace down there, and the lines become clearer, the faces more distinct. The picture became truer, more real.
I know that writers wrote long before computers, but if someone ripped the laptop from my hands and said I must find another way to paint the pictures behind my eyes, then I would be lost. I couldn't do it. The energy expended would far exceed the energy regained. I would be utterly silenced, an aphasic who knows the words but loses them on the road to her mouth, voiceless even as the words kept crowding and screaming in my head. Technology lets me present the face I feel beneath my skin and not the twitching, disordered, discombobulated wreck my errant fingers insist that I am. I'm not lovely or even pretty. I might even be ugly and unpopular. But at least my words are not prisoners of my mouth and stupid, slow fingers. At least they no longer cut my throat for want of release. At least they are clear enough to be heard.
My first writing machine was an old IBM Selectric typewriter. It was a sophisticated bit of equipment at the time, bought by the school so that I could complete written assignments in a legible fashion. It even came with correction tape. It hummed loudly, and it sounded like a rock crusher when it "corrected" a mistake. I loved that machine, as did my poor teacher, who no longer had to torture his eyes in order to decipher my scrabble. My mother brought home a similar typewriter from work. Ostensibly, it was to do my homework on, but I spent a great deal more time recording the pictures in my head. Since I wasn't permitted to leave the house and had few friends with the time or the means to escape even if I were, I spent entire weekends clacking away at this old rolltop desk just off the living room. It smelled of ink and varnish, and the typewriter smelled of warm plastic. I was very young then, so those early stories were innocent stories about a TV show called Stingray. Since romance and sex weren't yet on my emotional radar, they were filled with car chases and dutiful recountings of what characters were wearing and what the protagonists were eating for breakfast. I remember a particularly breathless description of the hero's "runny eggs".
Sex and romance wouldn't make an appearance until two years later, and then in the guise of dreadful NKOTB h/c fic that featured a few fumbling kisses. I wouldn't write my first sex scene until I was almost fourteen, and even then, it was vague and horrible because I was a sheltered child whose only exposure to sex had been the under-cover fumblings of couples on primetime TV. Because I was disabled, it was assumed by everyone, including my mother, that not only would I never have sex, but I would never want sex or experience sexual urges. Thus, I was never given the Talk. The only sex education I received until adulthood and exposure to porn came from a nice but repressed Christian-school biology professor who told his sniggering charges all about "turgid penises", and the more worldly girls at the local Girls' Club. It wasn't until I saw my first porno at sixteen that I realized sex lasted longer than a minute.
Anyway, that wasn't my original point. My point was the old IBM Selectric. As great as it was, it had its limitations. While it could erase words as long as the correction tape worked, it couldn't move text. Nor could it go back and add lines. If I suddenly decided that one paragraph worked better above another rather than below it, the only remedy I had was to rip out the page, roll in a fresh piece of paper and retype the entire page. Depending on the magnitude of the changes, I had to retype several pages. It was laborious and frustrating. Sometimes I worked on the same pages for weeks just trying to correct all the mistakes and incorporate minor changes in position.
And even if all that were to my liking, there was still the problem of listing text. I could never get the paper to roll into the typewriter evenly, and as a consequence, most of my manuscripts looked as though they'd been banged out on a fishing trawler in the middle of a death roll. It drove me to distraction because I wanted it to look as neat and clean as it did in all the books I read. Plus, I had dreams of being a famous writer someday, and I thought that no one would read my books if they looked like they'd been written on a teeter-totter. I went through ridiculous amounts of paper in my pursuit of perfection, so much that my mother ordered me to start using both sides of the paper. You can imagine how well that went over. Between natural teenage melodrama and the heightened sense of suffocation that comes with being disabled and so reliant on others' better natures, it was The End of the World.
I thought of all this while I was writing last night, listening to music and effortlessly shifting lines within a paragraph and revising bits of dialogue. Changes that once took me hours and sheet after sheet of white paper were effected in mere seconds, freeing me to continue the story, to reveal more of the watercolor in my head. A highlight here, a drag-and-drop there, a backspace down there, and the lines become clearer, the faces more distinct. The picture became truer, more real.
I know that writers wrote long before computers, but if someone ripped the laptop from my hands and said I must find another way to paint the pictures behind my eyes, then I would be lost. I couldn't do it. The energy expended would far exceed the energy regained. I would be utterly silenced, an aphasic who knows the words but loses them on the road to her mouth, voiceless even as the words kept crowding and screaming in my head. Technology lets me present the face I feel beneath my skin and not the twitching, disordered, discombobulated wreck my errant fingers insist that I am. I'm not lovely or even pretty. I might even be ugly and unpopular. But at least my words are not prisoners of my mouth and stupid, slow fingers. At least they no longer cut my throat for want of release. At least they are clear enough to be heard.
Tags: