Remember the Past to Write Your Story

Using Hemingway's typewriter at the Hemingway Museum.

With all of the new software for writing or editing it is hard to remember the days when people wrote with those things! I completely agree that technology has improved writing and screenwriting in monumental ways, but it is important to remember our roots as writers.

Vising this Hemingway museum opened my eyes to the reality that he wrote the scripts to his movies on a typewriter. He did not have Final Draft completing his sentences, predicting his dialogue patterns or automatically formatting his scene structure. Even though it would be difficult and time consuming to write a work without some of this great technology it is still important to acknowledge how writing as evolved.

This does not directly improve your writing. Comma splices will not suddenly disappear if you remember where writers came from, but your writing would still improve.

Remembering where we came from offers a respect for the craft. This respect then is carried over into the time we spend on a particular work. It would be easy to give up and write the first thing that pops into your head. However I found it so rewarding to remember all of the trouble that previous writers had to go through just to get their messages across.

I do not want to disappoint them, so I would step up my game. Those other writers didn't give up when writing on a typewriter was too tiring, so there is no excuse to give up with all of the technology that modern writers have at their fingertips.

Remembering the past forces us to respect the present and hope for the future.