From the Paris Review interview, 1995
(quoted in part by Adam Phillips, in The Beast in the Nursery)
Interviewer
What tools do you require?
Hughes
Just a pen.
Interviewer
Just a pen? You write longhand?
Hughes
I made an interesting discovery about myself when I first worked for a film
company. I had to write brief summaries of novels and plays to give the
directors some idea of their film potential - a page or so of prose about each
book or play, and then my comment. That was where I began to write for the first
time directly onto a typewriter. I was then about twenty-five. I realized
instantly that when I composed directly onto the typewriter my sentences became
three times as long, much longer. My subordinate clauses flowered and multiplied
and ramified away down the length of the page, all much more eloquently than
anything I would have written by hand. Recently I made another similar
discovery. For about thirty years I?ve been on the judging panel of the WHSmith
children's writing competition. Annually there are about sixty thousand entries.
These are cut down to about eight hundred. Among these our panel finds seventy
prizewinners. Usually the entries are a page, two pages, three pages. That?s
been the norm. Just a poem or a bit of prose, a little longer. But in the early
1980s we suddenly began to get seventy and eighty page works. These were usually
space fiction, always very inventive and always extraordinarily fluent - a
definite impression of a command of words and prose, but without exception
strangely boring. It was almost impossible to read them through. After two or
three years, as these became more numerous, we realized that this was a new
thing. So we inquired. It turned out that these were pieces that children had
composed on word processors. What?s happening is that as the actual tools for
getting words onto the page become more flexible and externalized, the writer
can get down almost every thought or every extension of thought. That ought to
be an advantage. But in fact, in all these cases, it just extends everything
slightly too much. Every sentence is too long. Everything is taken a bit too
far, too attenuated. There's always a bit too much there, and it's too thin.
Whereas when writing by hand you meet the terrible resistance of what happened
your first year at it when you couldn't write at all . . . when you were making
attempts, pretending to form letters. These ancient feelings are there, wanting
to be expressed. When you sit with your pen, every year of your life is right
there, wired into the communication between your brain and your writing hand.
There is a natural characteristic resistance that produces a certain kind of
result analogous to your actual handwriting. As you force your expression
against that built-in resistance, things become automatically more compressed,
more summary and, perhaps, psychologically denser. I suppose if you use a word
processor and deliberately prune everything back, alert to the tendencies, it
should be possible to get the best of both worlds.
Maybe what I'm saying applies only to those who have gone through the long
conditioning of writing only with a pen or pencil up through their mid-twenties.
For those who start early on a typewriter or, these days, on a computer screen,
things must be different. The wiring must be different. In handwriting the brain
is mediated by the drawing hand, in typewriting by the fingers hitting the
keyboard, in dictation by the idea of a vocal style, in word processing by
touching the keyboard and by the screen's feedback. The fact seems to be that
each of these methods produces a different syntactic result from the same brain.
Maybe the crucial element in handwriting is that the hand is simultaneously
drawing. I know I'm very conscious of hidden imagery in handwriting - a subtext
of a rudimentary picture language. Perhaps that tends to enforce more
cooperation from the other side of the brain. And perhaps that extra load of
right brain suggestions prompts a different succession of words and ideas.
Perhaps that's what I am talking about.
Interviewer
So word processing is a new discipline.
Hughes
It's a new discipline that these particular children haven?t learned. And which
I think some novelists haven?t learned. 'Brevity is the soul of wit.' It makes
the imagination jump. I think I recognize among some modern novels the
supersonic hand of the word processor uncurbed. When Henry James started
dictating, his sentences became interminable, didn't they? And the physical
world, as his brother William complained, suddenly disappeared from them. Henry
hadn't realized. He was astonished.
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