Writing changes, and doesn’t
We examine several literary genres.
Among our writer’s tools is a fountain pen. For a time this sort of thing was ubiquitous, the instrument everyone used for writing by hand. Long before the digital revolution, however, it was replaced by the ball-point. The new type was less messy and did not require refilling with liquid ink, virtues that can be appreciated by anyone who has ever spilled an open inkbottle. Fountain pens are still sold, but they’ve become high-status items, like open fires and mechanical watches: fetching an extra price because they’re less practical than their replacements.
Our writer prizes his fountain pen for another reason. The flow of ink is smoother, so that any long piece of writing requires less effort than with a ball-point. He likens the difference to skating across smooth ice compared with dragging a sled over rocks. Indeed, he’ll go out of his way sometimes to hand-write something, just for the pleasure of operating the pen.
Mostly, though, he uses the pen for old-fashioned paper letters. These, also once ubiquitous, are all but extinct. They were an early casualty of the digital revolution, killed off by email. When you could convey a bit of personal news or comment almost instantly, by typing at a keyboard and hitting “send,” there seemed little point in writing it out on paper (some handwriting was quite unreadable), much less putting it in an envelope with a stamp and waiting a week or two for it to arrive.
The paper letter was killed off by email, but not exactly replaced. The literary form of the letter is different. It’s generally longer, definitely more coherent and structured, requiring more thought if only because erasures are much more difficult. While one of our writer’s correspondents writes his emails exactly as he used to write paper letters, no one else does. A technological change has substituted one literary genre for another.
New technology does not always mean literary change, however. The short, instant communication of a tweet bears a striking resemblence to the old telegram. The former’s character limit plays the same part as the cost-per-word of the latter, requiring a terse formulation of simple ideas. And both are (in different contexts) fast. The major practical difference between them is that the telegram went to one recipient only, while the tweet can reach millions.
We are also struck by the resemblence of the on-line blog to the venerable newspaper column. Each is a short essay, possibly on a specialist subject but often more general. The latter is limited by the space available in a printed paper, with an editor worried about the costs of ink and printers’ salaries and such; the former is limited mostly by the patience of the reader. In principle one can blog whole novels; in practice, few essays longer than a newspaper column will get read. The main practical difference is that a city might have had, once, columnists counted in the dozens, while bloggers (reaching worldwide) are in the millions.
So technology has allowed many people to practice literary genres (the short communication and the short essay) who would not have had the opportunity formerly. But what about those whose talents are best shown by the handwritten letter?
