Shakespeare and Me

William Shakespeare

   I am old enough to clearly remember the days when e-mails, word processing and instant messaging simply did not exist. Like many of us who are able to remember those days, it is hard to imagine how life carried on, in spite of the fact that we remember it carrying on just fine, thank you.
   Quite often (and particularly since I started blogging) I find myself marvelling at how the great writers, the Shakspeares, the Dickens, the Poes, the Whitmans et al, were able to be so prolific, given the what now seem like meagre tools they had to write with.
   I also remember what the writing process was like back when I was much younger; a piece of foolscap, a pen or pencil and a dictionary (if I had not forgotten one). I think back to the grade school English exams where I had to come up with some form of short story in an hour, the feverishness that went into that, the crossing out and re-writing involved. What surprised me at the time was that, in that kind of pressure-cooker atmosphere, I seemed to be able to come up with stuff that was half decent!

Charles Dickens

   Nowadays, I'm able to sit here with my laptop, get my spelling checked as quickly as I can write, simply delete whole lines or paragraphs, move them around if I want, and have a dictionary or thesaurus readily at my fingertips. If I have a desire for other people to read what I have almost instantaneously produced then I simply post a blog. If I ever get around to writing anything substantial (I just realized how close substantial is to substandard...) all I have to do is get the e-mail addresses of publishers and mail whatever it is I've written right to them!
   So this is the world of writing I am now used to. The physical act of writing has become so simple now that I often wonder what any of the great writers of the ages might have been able to produce with same modern technology I am now afforded.
   As prolific as Shakespeare was, what might his body of work now look like if he'd instantly been able to re-write lines or move soliloquies around. It's a little hard to fathom what he might have been able to accomplish. I have a vision of Dickens sitting at a candle-lit table, quill pen in hand, scrunched up balls of revisions lying about the floor. What if he had not had to endure that?

Stephen King

   These days you have writers like Danielle Steel and Stephen King churning out book after book, endlessly. What would their body of work look like if they had to constantly be dipping their pens into inkwells? I am fairly intimately familiar with the works of Stephen King. One of his techniques is to give the reader a heady dose of background info on characters as they appear, even if they only appear for a page or two. Very often this info is stuff you could easily do without (I'm glad I'm not King's editor...) and I'm sure he does this because, these days, it's easy to do it. I'm not so sure that a hundred and twenty years ago he would waste elbow grease and candlelight on all the extras he includes.
   All of this has me now wondering; would Shakespeare or Dickens even have benefited by having access to today's technology? I wonder if the creative thought process they went through while writing might actually have been harmed by the tools available today. I can only assume that much thought went into whatever words they were laying down, knowing that to have to correct it would be physically laborious and time-consuming. Were they given the ability writers today have to lay down vast stretches of literature and then change it instantly, if need be, would they have done this themselves and perhaps settled on something that wasn't too bad? Hard to say.
   So I need to keep all of this in mind as I lay pen to paper, figuratively-speaking. It is easy what I do here and that's partly why I do it. I do, however, feel some kind of responsibility to whoever reads what they find here to not waste their time, even if it is only five minutes out of their busy lives. Because I am certainly no Shakespeare, as you've noticed.