Here's a letter from my longtime pal Bruce Reznick…and lemme tell you how long I've known Bruce. The year we first met, Charlie Chaplin released his last movie, Muhammad Ali was still Cassius Clay and he was stripped of his boxing championship for refusing to go fight in the Vietnam War, and the highest-rated TV program in this country was The Andy Griffith Show,
Bruce will probably write and tell me I have the year wrong and if he does, he's probably right since he's one of the smartest guys I've ever known. His specialty is mathematics and he took time out from trisecting angles to send me this about writing on a computer…
Hi, Mark. I can tell you my experiences, which are different from yours, but lead to the same conclusion.
Typing a math paper usually requires symbols and letters from other alphabets, and when I started, before word processing computers, it required special symbol balls on IBM selectrics. (On PhD theses, which are not actually published, a lot of symbols were written in by hand.) You wrote your paper as best you could and sent it to the typist, and didn't do much revisions after that.
Once mathematicians got computers, we got programs that let us write symbols ourselves and papers ourselves. It takes a little longer because we go through way more revisions, but we can get the paper to look like what we want.
My father used to say of a draft that it "needs to be run through the typewriter again". A disadvantage of the current system is that you can passively keep parts you don't want to think about, even when it would be better if you started from scratch.
I had issues with typists because my handwriting wasn't very good. My favorite example was a paper in which I wrote in pencil "One often is interested in questions of the following kind," and the very patient typist wrote: "One of ten is interested in questions of the following kind". I wish.
The more I write on a computer, the harder it is to believe that I wrote my first work on that little Olivetti-Underwood manual portable that I have in my garage. It really now looks like something I must have found at a toy store.
I used that Fischer-Price plaything for my earliest professional work including scripts for DC, Disney and Gold Key. Then I upgraded to electric and Selectric and finally to my first word processor. I think my work was getting better during this period — or as some might say, less rotten — and some of that was simple experience. But some of it was the tool of my trade: The computer. I know it led me to do more revisions and had other benefits as well.
My friend Harlan Ellison worked the way he worked and it obviously worked for him. But one time at his house, in a workroom built to disadvantage someone of my height, he sat me down at his desk and asked me to type out, on his typewriter, some notes for an article he was doing for Playboy on the then-current comic book scene. If you're wondering how Groo the Wanderer got into that article…well, that's how.
Harlan wrote brilliant stories and essays on that typewriter on that desk sitting in that chair. I couldn't write so much as a colon..and not even a whole colon but one of the semi variety. I wound up sitting on the floor doing it in longhand on a legal pad. The way some of us work is simply that personal. We can make exceptions for special circumstances but our main, real work is done how and where we feel at home. Which is why I would never tell another writer how he or she should work or what they should write on.