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>I do remember reading a fairly compelling case that the art of fiction-writing has got noticeably better over the last 500 years or so. I've thought about this a bit since I've been trying to break into fiction writing. The thing I noticed, imagine how incredibly painful it was to edit your first draft back in the day. In comparison, these days we have month long contests (for fun) to write 50,000 word novels. Even though these are typically terrible, there are some that do get published and people enjoy. These stories are edited heavily. Not just grammar or spelling. Scenes are re-written. Added. Removed. Paragraphs moved. Erased. Added. Find/Replace to change a name. Etc. It's barely an inconvenience to do this on the computer. That's not easily the case with handwritten or typewritten pages. You end up re-typing it all out to see the next draft, just to notice how you need to butcher more of it and do it all over again. Page reformatting by itself is a God send. I think modern writers are able to revise their work more often and easily in far, far less time. Just one example, I type about 3-5 times faster than handwriting. That iteration process builds up more skill, thus, better writers. Old school writers, especially pre-typewriter, probably went, "First draft is the only draft" more often than we think (minus minor corrections of course). I think the typewriter allowed the feasibility of multiple drafts without losing your damn mind, but the word processor makes it almost normal practice for many pro-writers to have 10+ drafts. Some even do full rewrites for their second or even third draft NORMALLY. At that, the amount of professional stories someone would hear or read was minimal too. Most things were new to people even if you weren't original. These days, everyone has a huge backlog of stories they've read/heard over the years. Probably one year of someone's entertainment consumption was a lifetime over 100 years ago. I read somewhere that the average well-educated person (not scholar) in the 1700-1800s read in a month what average folks today (not even well educated) read/hear in about a day. Another example, if you want to make a comedy show, you have to see if Simpsons, Futurama, South Park or Family Guy already did the same gag because people will go, "You're unoriginal". Even South Park had an episode that Simpsons "already did it", and that was a decade ago. The bar is just super high now because of both storytelling skillsets and expectations from audiences. Just an observation from an idiot. |
... but can you think at what you are typing 3-5 times faster?
Handwriting is slower than typing but the speed at which you can come up with ideas and expand them in a form suitable to be written should be more or less the same, as a matter of fact having a bottleneck at the final output allows more time for the creative part or just for thinking about which words to use, how to construct the sentence, etc.
I guess it all depends, but - only as a parallel, unrelated example - I didn't mind too much the (good ol') times when the computers were so poorly performing that you had to turn calculation off on spreadsheets (and had to hit F9 from time to time), it somehow gave me the time to get an overall look at what I had just written/changed.