Developments in technology inevitably affect the course of
our writing. Computers and cell phones are just two of the more visible advances
that come to mind. I wrote my first manuscript on a small portable typewriter
that would get the type bars stuck together if you typed too fast. That was
1948 when I was a journalism student at the University
of Tennessee. I turned out the
second novel manuscript in the sixties using an up-to-date Royal typewriter. It
wasn't until I retired in mid-1989 that I started my current fiction-writing
career with a computer.
I used an early word processing program with a limited file
size, meaning you had to keep creating new files with each few chapters. Then I
switched to Microsoft Word in the early nineties and have had no problems since. The
characters in my books have grown with the computer, too. In Beware the
Jabberwock (written circa 1991), my protag Burke Hill doesn't use a computer, but he
gets a bit of education on the subject in the next book, The Poksu Conspiracy (currently
under revision for release in a few months).
On the subject of telephones, at the time of those early
books there were pay phones and phone booths everywhere. One of my writers
group colleagues says "he hung up the phone" is passé. Not in those
days. Most people used the familiar dial instrument. There were cell phones,
but people didn't carry them around in a pocket. They weighed a pound or
better. My characters had no use for them in those first books.
You couldn't just dial or punch in the number for an
overseas call. You had to place it through an overseas operator, and the call
quality wasn't always the best. Now you just enter the international code and
number and there's your party.
For communication on the go back then, investigators used
hand-held portable radios. That's the scenario in Beware the Jabberwock when an
FBI agent needs to talk with another colleague at the Atlanta
airport.
The digital age for photography hadn't arrived yet, so all
photos were taken with film. I opted for the latest film development, though,
producing unbelievable images using Kodak's Tmax 3200 film pushed to ASA 25000.
It would make a license plate readable from two blocks away. In a 2011 book I updated
the technology to use a NASA system for enhancing moving images.
Since 1991-2 was prior to the World Wide Web, information
searching was done mostly at the library. My character Burke Hill looks up
information at both a public library and a newspaper library. My research for
the book took place primarily at the Vanderbilt
University library, using both
books and magazines. Now I get the same sort of data on my computer with a Google
search.
So it's obvious that technology has a big impact on how we
write as well as what we write. Let me know how your work is affected by other
technological developments.
Incidentally, Beware the Jabberwock is now available for the
Kindle here and will be published in paperback in a few weeks.
