This article, penned by Tom Sharpe, appeared in The Listener magazine on 25 April 1985.
The difficulty of writing about word processors is that the people who invent them lisp in numbers and the machine-code game. To be more accurate, one slips into jargon and even when this is ‘user-friendly’ it is still less easy for pre-electronic man to understand than English. One must therefore reconcile oneself to enormous and incomprehensible manuals or a ‘hands-on’ training-course.
I’ve perversely chosen the former. My first word processor nearly drove me insane and by the time I had mastered the technique of using it, I was no longer interested in the brute. Besides, the screen flickered intolerably and I was spending so much time playing with its ability to insert text or move it that I found it easier to fall back on sheets of paper in a typewriter and alter my text with a pen. I got much more done that way.
I also encountered a number of psychological problems, which are perhaps more important for an author than the technical ones. My age may be to blame but, if a typewritten page is at one remove from a page in longhand, words that appear on a screen and are then saved to disk, reappear and involve several more moves before they come out printed on paper, are at several more removes, and give one a feeling of frightening insubstantiality. At any moment a change in voltage can wipe out what one has written before ‘saving to disk’ and, even when one has saved, a disk can ‘crash’.
I learnt this to my cost two years ago, and ever since I have transferred (‘saved’) every paragraph, first to one disk, then to another and finally to a third and fourth with an obsessiveness close to paranoia. All very time-consuming and still not entirely reassuring: leave a disk next to a loudspeaker or something with a strong magnetic force and you can lose an entire novel. True, you can, if you are Carlyle, lend Mill the manuscript of your French Revolution and have a cleaning lady with more discrimination than she knew burn the damned thing, but I’ve always felt she must have lit a great many fires to get rid of the lot. So, paper burns, say the wp merchants; where’s the difference? In my inability to know a magnetic force when I’m near one. And while no one is likely to light a fire with my disks, I defy the experts to produce one that doesn’t burn as readily as paper. The chances of losing my precious manuscript seem to have been multiplied.
But the real dangers lie elsewhere. Having persuaded myself that surges in voltage can be circumvented and that the chances of four disks disappearing in a puff of magnetic smoke are infinitesimal, I still have serious doubts. They have to do with style and the seduction of putting words into an electronic device that doesn’t yet, in spite of its 30,000-word dictionary and spelling-checker (Whose spelling, pray, English or American? Or perhaps that of those terrible manuals), know the meaning of the word ‘prolix’. My Concise Oxford Dictionary does, though: lengthy, wordy, tedious. Could any writer wish for a worse description of his work? And that’s precisely what the word processor loves: prolixity.
Never mind its supposed ability to delete entire paragraphs, to substitute one word for another at the push of a button, to ‘search’ a document for a phrase and alter it automatically. Forget ‘pasting’ and ‘moving’ and ‘mail-merging’, whatever that is, the seductive power of the machine invites the poor, besotted author to pour words out with the promise that they can be removed, oh, so easily. Codswallop. Force me to put paper in a typewriter and type out a page only to discover it’s all wrong and I’ve got to start again . . . and then again, and I’ll begin to think before I put a word wrong.
Not so with this word-gulper; the damned thing will take any trash I give it, and beg for more. And I don’t have the discipline to ration it or my own prolixity. Or do I? This new one has just told me I have written 688 words, 345 unique (!) words, 22 sentences, two paragraphs and one pages. (The poor creature can’t express itself in the singular.) But I am blaming it for my own failings. The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our Wordstars, but in ourselves.
Link to scan of article