Fronting up to easy-writer

Press, 6 March 1985, Page 41

Fronting up to easy-writer

By

RUSSELL BAKER

of

the “New York Times,” through NZPA New York For a long time after going into the writing business, I wrote. It was hard to do. That was before the word processor was invented. Whenever all the writers got together, it was whine, whine, whine. How hard writing was. How they wished they had gone into dry cleaning, stonecutting, anything less toilsome than writing. Then the word processor was invented, and a few pioneers switched from writing to processing words. They came back from the electronic frontier • with glowing reports: “I have seen the future and it works.” That sort of thing. I lack the pioneer’s courage. It does not run in my family, a family that arrived on the Atlantic beach 300 years ago, moved 50 metres inland for security against high tides, and has scarcely moved since, except to go to the drugstore. Timid genes have made me. I had no stomach for the

word processor. Still, one cannot hold off for ever. My family had given up saddle and stirrups for the automobile, hadn’t it? Had given up the candle for the kerosene lamp. I, in fact, used the light bulb without the slightest sense of betraying the solid old American values. And yet... My trade was writing, not processing words. I feared or detested almost all things that had “processing,” “process” or “processed” attached to them. Announcements by airplane personnel that I was in a machine engaged in “final landing process” made my blood run cold. Processed words, I feared, would be as bland as processed cheese. So I resisted, continued to write, played the old fuddyduddy progress hater when urged to take the easy way and switch to processing words. When former writers who had turned to processing words spoke of their marvellous new lives, it was the ease they always emphasised. So easy — the processing

process made life so easy (this was what they always said) — so infinitely easier than writing. Only an idiot — and here I caught glances fraught with meaning — only an idiot would continue to suffer the toil of writing when the ease of processing words was available to be wallowed in. To shorten a tedious story, I capitulated. Of course I had doubts. For all those years I had worked at writing only because it felt so good when you stopped. If processing words was so easy, would there be an incentive left to write? Why are we moved to act against our best judgment? Because we fear public abuse and ridicule. Thus the once happy cigarette addict is bullied out of his habit by abuse from health fanatics, and the author scratching away happily with his goose quill puts it aside for a typewriter because he fears the contempt of the young phalanxes crying, “Progress!” My hesitation about processing words was being noticed by aggressive young

people w’ho had processed words from their cradles and thought the spectacle of someone writing was as quaint as a four-child family. I hated being quaint. I switched to processing words, and — man alive! talk about easy! It is so easy, not to mention so much fun — listen, folks, I have just switched right here at the start of this very paragraph you are reading — right here I switched from the old typewriter (talk about goose-quill pen days!) to my word processor, which is now clicking away so quietly and causing me so little effort that I don’t think I’ll ever want to stop this sentence because — well, why should you want to stop a sentence when you’re really well launched into the thing — the sentence, I mean — and it’s so easy just to keep her rolling right along and never stop since, anyhow, once you do stop, you are going to have to start another sentence, right? — which means coming up with another idea. What the great thing —

really great thing — really and truly great thing is about processing words like this, which I am now doing, is that at the end, when you are finally finished, with the piece terminated and concluded, not to say ended, done and thoroughly completed to your own personal, idiosyncratic, individual, one-of-a-kind, distinctive taste which is unique to you as a human person, male or female, adult or child, regardless of race, creed or colour — at the end which I am now approaching on account of exhausting available paper space the processing has been so easy that I am not feeling the least, slightest, smallest or even somewhat minuscule sensation of tired fatigue exhaustion, as felt in the old days of writing when the mechanical machines, not to mention goose-quill pens, were so cumbersomely difficult and hard to work that people were constantly forever easing off on them, thus being trapped into the time-wasting thinking process, which just about does it this week, spacewise, folks.