In the 1980s I was a member of an active writing circle. We were discussing that senescent chestnut, 'how to write', and one member proudly said that he couldn't be bothered with these new-fangled confabulation processors that were conscientious approximately starting to come in assistance and homes. No, he said, he had an electric typewriter. That was admirable sufficiently for him. It did all he wanted to act and produced submittable copy. He had got used to it, it suited him and he was can't complain to stick with it. Other, also existing members, proverb the benefits of personal computer technology and were anxious to exhortation about which gadget to buy, worth for money, and suppliers. It provoked a animated debate. That is, until one member pointedly said: 'Shakespeare used a quill pen. That was acceptable enough for him. Whether we aspire to wanting to draw up as fine as the Aged Bard, why don't we commit to paper his methods?'
Well, we don't, most of us. Provided you've seen that film, 'Shakespeare in Love', you testament appreciate that writing with a quill is awkward and messy. It's a skill that has to be learned from an early age, and not something to be dabbled with. Yes, England's greatest playwright used that method, however then, he didn't get a collection of choice. In one hang-up he was bare modern: he could write. A lifetime before, the one tribe in the homeland who could employ a pen at all would carry been the landed gentry and monks. Shakespeare was identical fortunate in having received an education, of sorts, and so could settle pen to paper. The lone alternative, then and earlier, would admit been for him to construct the baggage up and dictate it to someone who had the literary skills to transcribe it. Much earlier, poets simply memorised what they created. We bell them Troubadours, and project that that was a romantic age, forgetting the damn inflexible employment that committing paragraph to flash on involves, (and the problems of trying to retention the text following ' fancy Bob Dylan).
The answer, of course, is that writers chalk up used all practice and method of 'writing' fini the ages. That best-selling novelist Jeffrey Archer is besides great-hearted of the naked truth that he drafts all his works by hand, then gives them to a choice of secretaries to assign on chitchat processor, then works with an Editor at his publisher to buff up the draft and turn it into saleable copy. One of the most prolific authors of original times, the creator of Perry Mason, Earle Stanley Gardener, never wrote a unmarried signal down in his life. He spoke every subject of all his novels into a Dictaphone and then again, paid a secretary to catching the tapes and type them up for him. The best-selling romantic novelist Barbara Cartland used to corker in luxury on silk covered sofas and was accustomed to speaking her passage into the scented air in front of her. A secretary was sitting extreme her, elsewhere of sight, fascinating down the prose in shorthand. Ho hum, a flush variety. Haul your pick.
In new times, we retain moved on, (or so we pretend). However, be warned: a computer, or committed term processor, is no longer the heighth of sophistication and the form of the future. It all depends, you see, on where the contents are going, I mean, who you are planning to letter them to. The puzzle for fresh authors is that most of them all the more assume they hold to deal with also old-fashioned Traditional Publishers. These concern folk haven't moved on on account of the 1930s. They yet expect writers to correspondence them printed copy, probably a instance event and a synopsis if you are a novelist. From the mark of theory of this clement of publisher, it doesn't argument what way or wealth were used to practise that copy, it's all good. Dictaphone, secretaries, pc or still electric typewriter, it all comes away as brunet print on ghastly paper, and as great as it's twofold spaced and single sided, it meets their requirements ' well, as least as far as submission rules are concerned. There is much no warrantly that your plainly printed proposal will be accepted, or yet looked at. It rather depends on who you are.