Do we write differently on a screen?

Via The New Yorker, an article that merits blowing the cobwebs off this site: Do We Write Differently on a Screen? Excerpt:

I wrote my first story in a university library, in Boston. It was 1978, and I was bored to death with structuralism and post-structuralism. I wrote with a cheap ballpoint pen in the exercise book that I used for lecture notes. I noticed at once that the time passed differently when writing a story. It wasn’t quicker or slower, simply absent. You moved into a dream space. You didn’t know whether it was early or late. 

When I finished, I typed up the story on a small manual typewriter. I have to thank America for teaching me how to type fast, with all fingers and never looking at the keys. In England, you gave your weekly essay assignments to professors handwritten. In the States, they had to be typed. Walking back through the campus, late on spring evenings, you could hear a clatter of typewriters from open windows. I bought a book called “Teach Yourself Typewriting.”  

When a story was typed, you let it rest, then reread it and made handwritten corrections. Then reread it again. Then again. Then typed it up again, hopefully without mistakes. A lot of paper was thrown away. A lot of Wite-Out was used. You were a craftsman, producing pieces of paper with neat black signs. After making photocopies, you sent the story, by post, to a magazine, and it came back, months later, with a rejection and perhaps some suggestions how to improve it. You rewrote and retyped and re-sent. 

It was many years before I had a story published. Meantime, I moved back to the U.K., then, with my Italian wife, to Verona, where I began to translate. Here, typing skills were invaluable. You rode your moped into town in the morning, picked up a piece of work—perhaps a description of a marble-quarrying machine—rode home and had to translate it onto camera-ready paper for evening delivery and immediate printing. There was no time for rough drafts. You read each sentence, thought it through, produced an English version in your head, and typed it out perfect the first time. It was a fantastic discipline. And hugely stressful.  

In the early eighties, we bought an electric typewriter that could memorize about half a page before printing it out. To read the page, you had to scroll it from right to left, on a single line of display, between keyboard and print roller. It cost the equivalent of a thousand euros in today’s money and wasn’t satisfactory. 

A year or two later, we spent double that for a machine that could memorize a fantastic four pages on an audiocassette and offered a yellowish monochrome screen where you could read as many as fifteen lines at once. That was the machine on which I translated Roberto Calasso’s “The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.” On more than one occasion, the audiocassette jammed and four pages of work were lost.

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[DJ]

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