The advent of “word processing” — what an odd phrase — electronic writing, writing on a computer, whatever you call it, meant a sudden and complete end to these endless deliberations and tests of your fine motor skills. You could change anything! anywhere! right up to the point of printing the thing out — and if you had the financial wherewithal or institutional permissions that allowed you to ignore the cost of paper and ink, you could even print out a document, edit it, and then print it out again. A brave new world indeed. Thus, as the novelist Anne Rice once commented, when you’re using a word processor “There’s really no excuse for not writing the perfect book.”
But there’s the rub, isn’t there? For some few writers the advent of word processing was a pure blessing: Stanley Elkin, for instance, whose multiple sclerosis made it impossible for him to hold a pen properly or press a typewriter’s keys with sufficient force, said that the arrival of his first word-processing machine was “the most important day of my literary life.” But for most professional writers — and let’s remember that Track Changes is a literary history of word processing, not meant to cover the full range of its cultural significance — the blessing was mixed. As Rice says, now that endless revision is available to you, as a writer you have no excuse for failing to produce “the perfect book” — or rather, no excuse save the limitations of your own talent.
