Beating writer's block

Many years ago, when I was writing freelance articles for several magazines, including the old Modern Motor, Modern Boating and others in the same stable, I used to hammer away on an old typewriter.

Writers block? I had it frequently. So I developed the habit of just typing anything about the subject in hand. I simply typed a single paragraph on an A5 sheet of copy paper. Then another . . . and another . . . and so on!

When all my ideas were exhausted I would stop, read the pages through, put them in the right order, fill in the gaps [it was easy at this stage], write an intro paragraph and any others necessary, add photos and captions, shove the whole lot in an envelope and send them off. Another deadline met!

Then I read that Olivetti had brought out a computerized gizmo called a word processor. I read how it was simple to rearrange words, or even whole paragraphs, on a small screen and then print everything out when it was finished to your satisfaction. I was enthralled. Couldn't get one though - they were, from memory, about $16,000 each.

At that stage, PCs had not been invented, but as far back as 1983, word processors were taking the office world by storm. I ended up getting a monster called a Jacquard J500. Would you believe it took two people to lift it, and four people struggled to move its 20 megabyte (yes, megabyte!) hard drive unit. Yet word processing was everything I anticipated. I thought all my Christmases had come at once

After that, personal computers appeared and started to re-invent the world. Since then I have been through the whole range, from 8086 processors to 286, 386, 486 and today’s Pentiums, with the software getting more and more sophisticated. It has been an exciting trip.

Software like Word, Excel, Publisher, PowerPoint, better, lighter and faster computers and, of course, the internet are all a huge advantage in today's office environment. They are all excellent, necessary business aids, all capable of doing much more than we usually need, solving production problems that we often don't know exist until we see the answer to them.

Yet from a writer's viewpoint - and I stress, a writer's viewpoint, the latest word processors don't offer any more advantages than some of the originals. If all you want to do is write, you really only need an old 486 notebook and one of the original versions of Microsoft Word.

I guess my concept of word processing is pretty basic. It helps me beat the dreaded writer's block by putting anything down, in any order, then moving paragraphs around with ease and without paper. The latest version of Word does that admirably - but so did the first version, as did the software on my old, original chugger - the Jacquard J500 in 1983.