How Literature Became Word Perfect
Before the word processor, perfect copy was the domain of the typist—not the literary genius.
By 1984, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Michael Chabon, Ralph Ellison, Arthur C. Clarke, and Anne Rice all used WordStar, a first-generation commercial piece of software that ran on a pre-DOS operating system called CP/M. (One notable author still using WordStar is George R.R. Martin.)
.. In 1984, Apple released the Macintosh personal computer, which included MacWrite, a word processor that couldn’t deal with documents over eight pages. Very few writers liked it—with the notable exceptions of Douglas Adams, creator ofThe Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Mona Simpson, who used MacWrite to compose Anywhere but Here while interning at The Paris Review.
.. Many of the highest-browed in the literary world resisted word processing for decades. Indeed, some writers would conceal the fact that they used a word processor for fear of being tarnished by an association with automation or inauthenticity. In a 2011 New York Times article, Gish Jen recalled colleagues at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the 1980s doctoring their printouts, adding unnecessary pencil annotations in order to make their manuscripts seem more “real,” less perfect. Perfect copy, after all, was for the typist, not the genius.
.. Isaac Asimov changed his writing practice radically when he began to word process in 1981 at the ripe age of 61. A producer of notoriously dirty copy, Asimov found word processing cleaned up his act: “I end up with letter-perfect copy and no one can tell it wasn’t letter-perfect all the time. … Then I have it printed—br-r-rp, br-r-p, br-r-p—and as each perfect page is formed, my heart swells with pride. … I hope the copy editors appreciate the new me.”
.. Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, published in 1883, is commonly thought to be the first typewritten book. But Twain dictated that book to an assistant. In publishing, a typewritten copy would be annotated and sent back for changes via a long chain of staffers.
.. was for many writers special because it is done with light. Andrei Codrescu wrote that the Kaypro “let you write with light on glass, not ink on paper, which was mind-blowing. It felt both godlike and ephemeral.” The word processor is a powerful and empowering tool, far less about dominating the prone typewriter than about feeling humbled in the presence of infinite possibility.