Quoth the Raven: "Not Again!"

by Dan Gutman

What if Edgar Allan Poe had used a word processor?

For starters, we never would have known that his classic story, "The Murders In The Rue Morgue,"
was originally titled "The Murders In The Rue Trianon-Bas." If Poe had a computer on his desktop, he
would have simply inserted the better title on the screen and wiped the old one off forever.

Because there were no computers in 1841, we can look at Poe's handwritten corrections on his
original manuscript. It's being displayed along with dozens of others from American history, science and
literature in "Legacies of Genius," an exhibit at The Historical Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
This exhibit, besides showcasing priceless manuscripts, also points out what is perhaps the only bad
thing about word processing. With the advent of the personal computer in this decade, writers no
longer leave a "paper trail" of their thoughts that can be studied by future generations.

The very advantage of writing on a computer is what will make future scholars curse the machines.
Writers no longer need to painstakingly copy draft after draft by hand. If something isn't perfect, they
can change it easily on-screen, and the old draft disappears forever. Almost every professional writer
has now become a word processing convert.

Our written heritage is what links us to past generations. This written record of the evolution of ideas
helps us gain insight into the world. The invention of the typewriter took away some of that information.
Unfortunately, word processing pretty much eliminates it entirely. We will no longer be able to see how
masterpieces were created.

Looking closely at a sheet of paper Edgar Allan Poe wrote on, you can see that he crammed as many
as 15 tiny words on a line and an astounding 61 lines on a page. My word processor puts 26 lines on a
page.

Poe hardly ever crossed out any words or inserted corrections. He was an editor's dream. So was
Abraham Lincoln. His letter to New York Times editor Henry J. Raymond is neat and clean.

Charles Dickens, on the other hand, was pretty messy. In his manuscript of the "Pickwick Papers," he
crossed out nearly one word on each line. Sometimes the word is removed; other times Dickens wrote
another word over the crossed-out word.

Most writers, it seems, liked to make changes as their work progressed. You can see how Joseph
Conrad kept changing his mind to make his sentences more active in "Lord Jim." Isaac Newton put
nearly as much information in his margins as he did on the page itself. Ernest Hemingway, one of the
few writers in this exhibit who used a typewriter, was not afraid to jot added notes and insert them in
his margins.

"From now on, you won't be able to see the creative process in process," says Edwin Wolf, guest
curator of "Legacies of Genius. I don't know, if that's good or is that bad?"

Wolf has no qualms about technology. He uses an Epson word processor. 

"No one will be able to see original manuscripts," says Wolf. "Historians will have to judge works as
they appear, not as they are made. This won't stop a writer from writing. It's only going to stop
somebody from doing a Ph.D. dissertation on how it was done. They'll have to look for something
else."

A hundred years from now, will scholars be able to study the writing of a Steven King or Tom Clancy
to find out how their thought processes worked back in the 1980's?

On second thought, will anyone WANT TO?

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