Writing is not easy. Sudden unforeseen calamities lurk in the shadows. Consider Shakespeare one morning while putting quill to parchment, writing the famous line, “to be or not to be”, when his cat leaps onto Will’s desk, knocks over the ink bottle, ink flooding over the parchment, blackness blotting out what Will had written. To kill the cat or not kill the cat. That was the question.
Or Dashiell Hammett typing furiously towards the end of a chapter in “The Maltese Falcon.” He is in the writer’s bliss zone, words flowing like water from a faucet. But one of the typewriter keys is heading towards its desired targeted white page, while two keys, on either side of the rising key, are descending, all colliding in a twisted metal pileup, stuck together unable to be pried apart. Words stopped flowing. Hammett’s right fist pounds into the keyboard. Writers hate it when flowing words are turned off.
I doubt writers use quill and ink today, but some old school writers may use an electric typewriter or write on yellow legal paper. I tried the yellow sheets, but I had trouble reading my handwriting. The modern writer can use a computer, laptop, or tablet to write in Word.doc, using spell check, or they can purchase writing apps like Scrivner, Write!, Novlr, or a dozen others. Then Writers have Facebook, X, Instagram, Tik Tok. And writers create their own websites and publish on Kindle Direct.
What can go wrong for the modern writer when everything is easily accessed. Spell checks never miss misspelled words do they. Your cat can’t accidently jump on your keyboard, a paw hitting delete while you are proofreading after all. Computers never have problems do they.
The more things change, the more things remain the same. My cat is sneakily approaching as I type. I have to chase him out.
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