Common ground

Machines began to affect creative artists. In fact, some people noticed that poets were particularly fond of word processors because poets change what they write more than any other type of writers do.

Hugh Downs, Perspectives

When I visited the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville a few years ago I was struck by a display showing rough drafts of notable country songs. One could see how songwriters crossed out words and replaced them with others and, in some cases, rephrased entire lines. (That's a Waylon Jennings song at right.) Some songwriters and poets may still work on paper in this way, but most have probably moved on to computers, where their verses can be changed without leaving a trace of what came before. (This may actually be unfortunate for those of us who enjoy seeing how great writing evolves. That Nashville display could never happen in the Computer Age.)

In an essay in his 1995 book Perspectives, Hugh Downs remembers when, not so many years ago, those at home in the world of art and humanities and those at home in the world of technology and science had very little in common. On any university campus it was usually easy to see which students belonged to one group and which belonged to the other. They dressed differently, they acted differently and they rarely mixed together, at least not after the required freshman courses, or had reason to.

This situation changed with the advent of computers, Downs observes. Very quickly both the tech geeks and the art geeks began using the same tools and began to in some extent speaking the same language. Like engineers, scientists and even auto mechanics, artists and writers began using computers to do their work. This doesn't mean, of course, that there are no longer two different worlds, but just that these different worlds have more common ground than they once did.

I came of age during the typewriter age. I wrote my high school and college papers on a typewriter, and when I still fancied myself a short story writer, I wrote those stories on a typewriter. Later I worked for newspapers and for many years did my work on typewriters. At a newspaper we corrected our mistakes and improved our writing using copy pencils. A pristine appearance was not important until the work appeared in print. In letters, college term papers and the like, however, corrections were difficult. Many times I had to retype entire pages simply because I wanted to changed a few words around.

Today all this seems as antiquated as moving about in a city using horses. (In another essay Downs notes that traffic actually moved through New York City more quickly with horses and wagons than it does today with cars.) I now find it difficult to write more than three or four words in a row without making a typo. How did I ever manage with a typewriter?