CULTURE: Writing Styles in the Computer Era

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Abraham Lama

LIMA, May 14 1996 (IPS) - The “writing instrument” has come a long way since the days when Balzac used a goose-quill pen and Hemingway pounded his typewriter.

Contemporary authors like Nobel Literature Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez are lost without their computers. Peruvian novelist Alfredo Bryce Enchenique won’t even leave home without his “laptop”.

Computers are changing both the way writers write, and what they write. Today’s literary stylists are becoming addicted to the electronic wonders, although many still cling to the “good old ways”.

Those who resist change remain loyal to their typewriters, although those won over to the new technology proselytize with the ferocity of religious converts, and maintain that computers are both superior to typewriters and powerful engines for communication as well.

“Computers multiply creative possibilities: they spell and correct with better speed and accuracy, and using one is almost like thinking,” said Peruvian historian and essayist Juan Gargurevich.

“I’m sure that computers were invented precisely with the poet in mind. When composing, a poem is an object that you’re constantly reworking. The idea of a self-renewing surface where you can rewrite and rewrite and rewrite as much as you want just fascinates me,” enthused poet Antonio Cisneros.

But another Peruvian poet, Flavio Solorzano, won’t even use a typewriter. He needs a personal, unmediated relationship with his creations, so he writes by hand.

“I’ll type it only after erasing the whole page several times. By then, I need to type it so I can see what I’ve written,” he admitted.

Essayist, poet, humorist and journalist Felipe Angell Lama, better known in Peru by his pen name ‘Sofocleto’, quipped, “I don’t need a computer. I write with supersonic speed anyway, and I don’t correct because I hardly make mistakes. Anyway, it’s my hands that think and do the writing more than my brain.”

Angell’s fierce rejection of the computer differs from the sentimental reasoning of writer Luis Jaime Cisneros as much as from the opinions of Manuel D’Ornellas. He insists he will not abandon his old typewriter because he likens his close relationship with it to one which is almost sensual. (MORE)

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