JC: Macbeth vs. The Mac

Special Charis Connection Encore . . .

If Shakespeare had written Macbeth on a Mac would it be as good?

Not long ago I read a quote from an author so famous I can’t remember his name. He said, “Until someone writes a great book on a word processor, I’m sticking to pen and paper.”

Which begs the question: Is it possible to write a truly great novel using a word processor? Or should we trade in our software for quill and pen? Possibly we need only go back as far as typewriters.

Playwright Neil Simon said that he knew his writing was inspired when he could feel electricity shooting out of his fingertips. He insisted he wasn’t speaking figuratively.

Ouch.

Again, the question: Would Neil Simon be Neil Simon if his electric fingers were short-circuited by plastic keyboard keys? I doubt we’ll ever know.

Technology, like time, only goes one way. Forward. Rest assured Bill Gates knows this. I doubt the computer software billionaire lies awake nights worrying that ballpoint pen manufacturers are going to put him out of business.

But that’s good, isn’t it? It would be hard to go back to typing templates and White Out. Harder still to go back to fountain pens or quills and inkwells.

I still have my old manual Olivetti portable typewriter, which is amazing considering the number of near-death encounters it had in the dark hours of my education. The Olivetti came close to typewriter eternity every time I made a fourth mistake on the last line of a page. (Only three were allowed. Four meant you had to retype the entire page.) Do previous research papers flash before a typewriter’s eyes just before it smashes against a wall?

So why do I keep the relic around? As a conversation piece. Nostalgic for the older crowd. A curiosity for a generation who has never seen a machine rise up on its tiptoes to print capital letters. Mostly I keep it around as a prayer reminder. Whenever I see it, I thank God for word processors.

What’s not to like about them? A stroke of a key and my mistakes disappear as though they never happened. That’s pure grace, isn’t it?

And a machine that saves a man from having to count the words of his book-size manuscript is a gift from heaven. It’s my belief that the software developer who wrote the programming for the WORD COUNT feature should be granted sainthood.

(I once heard someone complain that the word counting feature wasn’t accurate. Can you imagine that? What kind of person double-checks the word-counting ability of a computer? That’s not only sick, it’s sacrilegious!)

What’s next? Challenging the SPELL CHECKER? How many times has that little feature made every single one of us look good?

Instead of wishing for the good ol’ days of Cuneiform and stylus or looking a gift-machine in the A-drive, maybe we should spend that time thinking up new features for software developers.

Here are some I’d like to see—

A MAKE EVERY WORD COUNT button. Push this baby and the computer automatically takes out the verbiage.

A MEET THE DEADLINE button. Push this button the night before your deadline when you still have fifty pages to write. It will automatically reformat your manuscript to 14pt Courier with two inch margins and type “The End” after the last line.

A DELETE REVIEWER button. This handy little feature locates crotchety reviewers who couldn’t recognize quality fiction if it was printed on their foreheads and makes them mysteriously disappear.

A JAMES PATTERSON SUSPENSE button. Pushing this button starts a new chapter after every page and a half regardless if it’s in the middle of dialogue.

And how about a little program that’s initiated by pressing the ESCAPE + ! keys simultaneously. It’s for writers who have written yourself into a corner. Like breadcrumbs, a sequence of events appears automatically leading you back to the main story.

So let’s stop all this nonsense about looking backward. Be honest. Would you really choose Shakespeare over auto pagination?

Which raises one final question: What feature would you like to see added to future word processing programs? Your answer may qualify you for software sainthood.

Jack Cavanaugh lives and writes in California. Check out his latest releases on www.amazon.com or www.christianbook.com . . . or at your favorite bookstore.