Writers of the Future, Volume 31 by L. Ron Hubbard

Author:L. Ron Hubbard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction and Fantasy, Anthology
Publisher: Galaxy Press, L.L.C.
Published: 2015-05-04T04:00:00+00:00

Fiction without Paper

It was a hard mental transition, when I first started writing on a computer back in 1979. The first time I lost twenty pages of writing, I began rigorously printing out my work every few minutes. If it wasn’t on paper, it didn’t really exist.

Gradually, my mindset changed. Instead of printing everything out, I saved it on multiple eight-inch disks. I no longer looked at stacks of typed-on paper with satisfaction, unless the same text was also saved on disk. Otherwise, typed manuscripts represented writing I couldn’t do anything with.

My writing didn’t become “real” until I could manipulate it with my word processing software. Therefore, printed paper was pretty useless. Only when I had keyed a manuscript into the computer did it exist in any useful way. There were new pleasures, though. When the story or novel was complete, ready to send to the editor, I would issue the print command, and the NEC Spinwriter would start to type away at a lovely speed, as if I had a fantastic typist preparing my manuscript for submission. I would eat dinner, play with my kids, or watch a TV show while hearing that untiring worker typing away in my office upstairs.

When it stopped, I would tear off the last sheet, then separate the fanfold pages of the manuscript on the perforations, until at last I had a tall stack of pages, which I boxed up, wrapped, addressed, and shipped off to the publisher. But I already thought of that pile of pages as a copy—the original, the true document, was the series of bits and bytes electronically and redundantly stored on multiple disks.

Now, more than thirty-five years later, I can’t remember the last manuscript I submitted in a box. Now I attach an .rtf file to an email and poof, it’s submitted. It never touches paper between my computer and the editor’s machine.

And while books printed on paper are still selling well, there are alternatives now. Books are written on a computer, prepared for publication, and issued as ebooks without paper ever being involved, between the writer and the reader. You can find a book that looks interesting on a website, buy it, and download it immediately. Either in print or as an audiobook, you start reading or listening only moments after making the decision to buy.

Yet all these hastenings do not make the act of telling the story one whit easier or faster.

You still have to invent the characters and the things they do and the reasons they do them. You still have to create the milieu of the story. You still have to spawn the language that will help readers create the story in their own minds.

And we still have to find people willing to put forth the work to read. I do mean “work.” Watching a story unfold on a screen is not a mindless process—when the camera skips around in time and space, we have to do the work of organizing the events in some kind of order in our minds.

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