Pen and ink, typewriters and wordprocessors

[NotWise]

Most of the world's great literature was written with some kind of pen on paper. More recently authors wrote with typewriters, and now we write with word processors. I've done all three. The progression in mechanics has been from slow and difficult to quick and easy.

Has the technological progression improved literature?

 

[LIVINRFANTASIES]

According to history the great writers moved out into a cabin in the wilderness or among the animals and spent years writing one book.

 

[sr71plt]

Most of the world's great literature was written with some kind of pen on paper. More recently authors wrote with typewriters, and now we write with word processors. I've done all three. The progression in mechanics has been from slow and difficult to quick and easy.

Has the technological progression improved literature?

It certainly has burgeoned the volume of available literature.

 

[NotWise]

It certainly has burgeoned the volume of available literature.

Or has the volume of literature burgeoned simply because our population has burgeoned?

 

[sr71plt]

Or has the volume of literature burgeoned simply because our population has burgeoned?

Nope, not even slightly. It's burgeoned because of the ease to get it written and to get it published and accessible. That was made possible by technology.

 

[NotWise]

Nope, not even slightly. It's burgeoned because of the ease to get it written and to get it published and accessible. That was made possible by technology.

I guess there has to be some value to technology,or we wouldn't have it. Has that technology improved the quality of our literature, or just the quantity?

 

[sr71plt]

I guess there has to be some value to technology,or we wouldn't have it. Has that technology improved the quality of our literature, or just the quantity?

On what basis?

Letting high-quality literature through that wouldn't otherwise be available? Yes. (Just one example. Novellas weren't even cost effective to make available before. Now they are, and there are a whole lot of great novellas accessible.)

Or, on proportion of high-quality literature to the total against dross to the total? No. But providing choice from a greater set is probably worth the much greater amount of dross. One person's dross is another person's treasure. (Erotica barely existed before, for example, and certainly not across the subgenre set we now have available.) Now they get to choose themselves as they never could do before computers and more open access options were available.

 

[Hypoxia]

Sturgeon's Law: 95% of everything is crap.

Thus, if we have 10x as much written stuff online, and 95% is crap, then we still have 10x more non-crap to dig through. Same goes with increased population generally: if 1% of the populace are geniuses, doubling population gives twice as many geniuses to dig us out of our problems (and invent new ones). And people to fill every niche.

Sturgeon's Creed: In the winter I'm a Buddhist; in the summer I'm a nudist.

We can thus expect massive increases of both Buddhists and nudists. Send in your reports.

 

[sr71plt]

I don't think doubling the population doubles good writers--with technology, again, being the reason for this. Those playing on their toys and not writing at all have more than doubled, thanks to technology. I certainly don't think that competence with using English has doubled with the doubling of the population. I edit books for mainstream publishers. What has come to me has been going toward the sloppy and illiterate over the past decade. The only thing that has improved is the spelling, because of spellcheck, and even that has its pitfalls that writers now don't seem to have enough grasp of the fundamentals to catch themselves.

 

[DreamCloud]

Technology has just made it much easier. Now those 100 monkeys can type Hamlet in half the time.

 

[SamScribble]

I think modern word processors probably make it easier for good writers to write well. They also make it easier for bad writers to think that they are writing well. And the vast majority of people who consider themselves to be ‘writers’ are bad writers.

 

[Hypoxia]

Technology has just made it much easier. Now those 100 monkeys can type Hamlet in half the time.

And then they post to alt.sex.stories because monkeys.

 

[sr71plt]

And I (and Hemingway could if he were alive now) can (and do) write half a million words of published works in a year now, and when I started writing fiction for publication I was happy to be able to write 60,000 words in a year with a Magnavox closed word processing system (no connection to anywhere else other than hard-copy printing), which was still miles better as a writing tool than an electric typewriter was, which was better than a manual typewriter (which is what Hemingway had to write on, but only when he wasn't in the trenches, where he liked to be), which was a much better aid than pen/pencil and paper (which is what Hemingway had when he was trudging around on battlefields). I wonder how many publishable words Hemingway was able to produce in a year--or could now produce with computers and with the ability to tell publishers that if they didn't want to publish this or that he could easily do it himself.

All of the added wordage in annual publishing isn't dross and much of it is in genres that people have come to want to read that publishers simply wouldn't publish twenty years ago.

Anyone here aware that this is an erotica writing site? Do you have any idea what erotica was being published twenty years ago and how broad the subgenres were that were getting published. Do you think there aren't readers for erotica? If so, what are you doing on Literotica?

Now, if anyone here thinks they are at a disadvantage to reaching readers now that they wouldn't have been twenty years ago, it's perfectly fine with me that you just don't write. Less competition and greater access to readers for me.

 

[Handley_Page]

On what basis?

Letting high-quality literature through that wouldn't otherwise be available? Yes. (Just one example. Novellas weren't even cost effective to make available before. Now they are, and there are a whole lot of great novellas accessible.)

Or, on proportion of high-quality literature to the total against dross to the total? No. But providing choice from a greater set is probably worth the much greater amount of dross. One person's dross is another person's treasure. (Erotica barely existed before, for example, and certainly not across the subgenre set we now have available.) Now they get to choose themselves as they never could do before computers and more open access options were available.

If I understand the term "Novella" correctly (Long short story or a short novel), such stories were published in pairs or threes, back in the day, so the production costs were about the same as a novel.

I'd be interested to understand more about "Erotica barely existed before" in terms of when in the C20 we mean. Even in my remote parts of the UK (remote as in not central) it was possible to obtain some really hot stories; publishers such as Olympia Press (in Paris, I believe, but printed in English).

I quite agree with you about the sub-genres. A customer had to know the bookseller or a good friend to get the 'right' book.

 

[NotWise]

And I (and Hemingway could if he were alive now) can (and do) write half a million words of published works in a year now, and when I started writing fiction for publication I was happy to be able to write 60,000 words in a year with a Magnavox closed word processing system.

My first word processor was a Wang. It seems like I should have written erotica with my Wang, but I never did.

Erotica now is much more available than it was a couple decades ago, but I'm not sure if it makes up a larger portion of the total output. We've probably had written erotica since we had written language, and graphic erotica even longer. Not much of the old stuff survives. It wasn't highly valued and of course the church has expunged it over and over (much as they did with the art excavated from Pompeii), but there is still "Josephine Mutzenbacher" and "Fanny Hill" and others.

Maybe 30 years ago you had to go to the news stand and buy porn in a magazine in a brown paper sleeve, but it was there. Judging from the scans I've seen I'd say there were probably magazines in print for about every kink and quirk we have now.

Technology has made it easier to produce writing, but the rule of supply and demand suggests that as it has become easier to produce its value should have declined.

 

[Serafina1210]

When I first started to write, I had to press cuneiform characters into clay tablets with a stylus. It took me ten years to write my first epic, and then a thousand slaves to make enough copies for all of Babylon.

It's all so much easier now.

 

[nsymserotica]

bye-bye

 

[sr71plt]

If I understand the term "Novella" correctly (Long short story or a short novel), such stories were published in pairs or threes, back in the day, so the production costs were about the same as a novel.

I'd be interested to understand more about "Erotica barely existed before" in terms of when in the C20 we mean. Even in my remote parts of the UK (remote as in not central) it was possible to obtain some really hot stories; publishers such as Olympia Press (in Paris, I believe, but printed in English).

I quite agree with you about the sub-genres. A customer had to know the bookseller or a good friend to get the 'right' book.

Steve Martin's Shopgirl was the first standalone novella published to print that was commercial and cost effective--because it was written by a celebrity from a different lane--as far as I can remember. Before the e-book revolution, mainstream publishers weren't even looking at anything below 60,000 words. If novellas were being put together and printed, I didn't see any (can you cite some?), although I wouldn't be surprised if they were by small art houses and produced at a loss. Again, I'd like to see what the examples of these were and what publishers were doing this.

Compared with the e-revolution, I'll stand by the claim that very little erotica was produced or bought before then. Where could it be bought other than furtively in adult stores and boutique mail order houses? Existence of a few classic "dirty books" does not a volume industry make. Certainly not on a mass basis or accessible in the open as the material is today. My first erotica was published in 2001. By then Internet advertising/sales was available. Still, I didn't try it again for ten more years.

 

[cfuhrer]

Has the technological progression improved literature?

I submit into evidence "Fifty Shades of Grey".
Case closed.

 

[sr71plt]

That's an awfully small set to build a sweeping generalization on.

Beyond that, it seems to be claiming arbiter rights on what literature is, certainly what "good" literature is. I'd guess that to the multitude of readers who bought and enjoyed that series, it was a vast improvement over what they were doing with literature before, which probably, for most of them, was nothing.

Shades of Grey slamming by writers is pretty much an "It should have been me" sour grapes expression. You don't have to read it if you don't want to and if your position is that it took readers away from you, you are being horribly shortsighted. Shades of Grey opened up a vast audience for erotica readers. If you really are any good, you will most likely have benefited from it no matter how badly it was written. Shades of Grey just becomes a false excuse for writers who haven't found a winning reader-connection strategy yet themselves--and need someone other than themselves to blame for that.

 

[Hypoxia]

Can we now wallow in er I mean access more written pr0n er I mean erotica than could previous generations? Yes indeed, because amateur online self-publishing. Is much of it awful even beyond Surgeon's Law? Has the crap level reached 97% yet? I don't read alt.sex.stories anymore so I can't say for sure, but yes, more content means more crap.

More crap -- but also more gems, the likes of which wouldn't have been found among sleazy paperbacks of yesteryear. Some masterpieces? I think so. But the huge flow also makes finding those gems difficult. Kiss many frogs, etc. And frogs of many colors er I mean niches. Yes, subcategories form a most baroque structure now. Where is that hidden masterpiece of BBC+BBW+frottage?

But I digress. I tried writing a dirty story when I was 16, typed on an old Underwood, mailed to Grove Press's EVERGREEN REVIEW. I may still have the rejection letter (my first) somewhere. This was way before Wang. (But not before wang-dang-doodles.)

Anyway, I still write some story stuff in pen on paper, usually just before I fall asleep. The computer is in another room. Or if I'm waiting somewhere public and don't wish to attract attention by dictating smut into my voice recorder. Or if I'm only feeling retro or poetic; I usually write songs and verses on paper, and some of my stories start as such.

In the bright world of the future we'll merely mentally visualize words and scenes and our cyber implants will transform them into finished pr0n. Right. Till then it's work work work.

 

[Handley_Page]

When I first started to write, I had to press cuneiform characters into clay tablets with a stylus. It took me ten years to write my first epic, and then a thousand slaves to make enough copies for all of Babylon.

It's all so much easier now.

Ah yes, 'Unicode' and all that. I gather that there's one for Linear B these days, too.
But what specie of Cuneiform did you enjoy most ?
Akadian, Hittite, Elamite or some other script ?

Compared with the e-revolution, I'll stand by the claim that very little erotica was produced or bought before then. Where could it be bought other than furtively in adult stores and boutique mail order houses?
Existence of a few classic "dirty books" does not a volume industry make. Certainly not on a mass basis or accessible in the open as the material is today. My first erotica was published in 2001. By then Internet advertising/sales was available. Still, I didn't try it again for ten more years.

The 'dirty books,' as you mention may not have been printed in millions, but the print run was sufficient to keep Olympia Press going for several years. but yes, it was obtained via contacts or mail order or even a licensed 'Sex Shop'.

 

[sr71plt]

The 'dirty books,' as you mention may not have been printed in millions, but the print run was sufficient to keep Olympia Press going for several years. but yes, it was obtained via contacts or mail order or even a licensed 'Sex Shop'.

Surely you aren't suggesting that the production and consumption of erotica then was anywhere even in the same galaxy relatable to what is produced, accessible, and consumed now. This is the point. If so, all you get from me is an eyeroll and a snort.

 

[Serafina1210]

Ah yes, 'Unicode' and all that. I gather that there's one for Linear B these days, too.
But what specie of Cuneiform did you enjoy most ?
Akadian, Hittite, Elamite or some other script?

Akkadian. After all this time I still remember a few words: I used them in the second part of my "Cunnilingus: A Short History."

 

[NotWise]

Surely you aren't suggesting that the production and consumption of erotica then was anywhere even in the same galaxy relatable to what is produced, accessible, and consumed now. This is the point. If so, all you get from me is an eyeroll and a snort.

The porn/erotica industry today is enormous -- no doubt much larger than it was a few decades ago, but that doesn't mean that the industry was insignificant then. Recall that the Golden Age of Porn was in the 70's and early 80's when pornographic films like "Behind the Green Door" approached mainstream budgets and audiences and some actresses were household names. Girly magazines were everywhere and erotic literature was easy to come by.

Low production costs provided by electronic media killed the Golden Age of Porn, but it also gave rise to lower standards, so that the quality of what is produced today is relatively low, although the quantity is high.

I suspect the same thing is true in literature. "Lolita" was initially published by Olympia Press in 1953. It's about 100,000 words and Nabokov took five years to write it. Now it's considered to be one of the best English language books of any genre published in the 20th century (see the Wikipedia article). Grove Press in the US published the unexpurgated "Lady Chatterley's Lover" and Miller's "Tropic of Cancer."

Are we seeing anything like those stories among the smut that flows so freely now?