It has been many moons since I had a real summer vacation, the kind that starts when school gets out in May and ends when school starts again in August. (In other states, I realize those dates work as June through September, but in Alabama it's May and August.) I still remember the summer before my senior year as one of the best. I spent six weeks that long ago summer in the 1980s at an electric typewriter from 8 until 5 Monday through Friday, banging out the draft of what evolved into a weird, fractured fairy tale about three bears named Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail. I know it was weird because my mother’s only comment after reading it was, “That was different.”
Do I still
have the manuscript? Of course. I haven’t read it since that summer, but I have
many forgettable manuscripts tucked away in a secret corner of my closet (in
that last moving box that never quite gets unpacked when you move) because even
though they’re pretty much garbage, I just don’t have the heart to part with
them. The collection also includes poetry from my junior and senior high school
years that I wrote during the “I walk alone” stage many teens suffer through.
Thinking
about that hidden collection reminds me how much the world around me has
changed since then. That long ago summer, when I was banging away at the
electric typewriter, computers were things that those of us in advanced classes
learned how to program using simple DOS commands [DOS was one of the earliest
programming languages] with a connection to a main frame computer at a local
college. If you could write a program that would alphabetize a simple list of
first names, you accomplished something!
The idea of
using a computer as an extremely intelligent typewriter was nothing more than a
gleam in the eyes of a few visionaries out west and in the high-tech
departments of a few universities. Electronic books such as Kindles or Nooks existed
only in science fiction. My owning a library
of hundreds of books one day was unthinkable unless I intended to be a
neurosurgeon, to marry extremely well or to stumble into an unexpected source
of wealth. Even had I access to wealth (which I didn’t), spending such wealth
was only possible if I had cash or a check from a bank account. ATMs didn’t
exist, either.
It was also a
good thing my writing that summer required no research. Because the
internet had yet to be imagined, let alone implemented, research meant you had
to stop writing to travel to the library and hope that it had the information
you sought. That is a far cry from today’s world, where I get highly irate if I
can’t find the answer to almost any question I can conceive of through Google.
Telephones
remained firmly attached to walls by cords, and lucky indeed was the teenager
who either had her own telephone line in her own room or a cord long enough to
pull the kitchen phone into another room for a little privacy. Except for a very privileged few individuals
who had access to cable, television was limited to what was playing on the
three major networks: ABC, CBS and NBC, and the public television station, PBS.
Larger cities would have one or two independent stations also, but not Montgomery,
Alabama.
As people get
older, they tend to wax nostalgic about “the good old days.” I miss some things
from those days (i.e., the long summer vacation), but as far as my writing and
research tools are concerned, I am grateful for progress.
What is your
favorite “modern” writing tool? What is your least favorite? Is there any tool
you regard as a necessary evil?
