Watching Someone Type

Not long ago, I was listening in the car to an interview with the novelist Terry Pratchett, who has been working steadily despite an increasingly disruptive Alzheimer's disease.  He's less able to concentrate than he had once been, but he also has lost some fine motor control; he's unable to type or to write long dedications at book signings.  But he's been an early adopter of technology for decades, and he now uses voice-recognition software to write orally.

I can't imagine writing that way.  My writing process is so circuitous.  A paragraph comes out, and it goes away.  Another paragraph comes out, but one of its sentences goes away.  And then three words change.  And then I move along to a new paragraph, but then re-reading I go back two paragraphs and change a misfit word.  The process of writing is not at all linear, whereas the process of oral storytelling is very linear. 

And thinking about this led me to wonder how other writers work.  A hundred years ago, when everything was manual, we at least had the benefit of working manuscripts that we could study.

A page of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America

But even there, we can only see some of the decisions.  We can't get the view of the writer's progress.  Does he barge two pages ahead like a snowplow, and then come back later to clean up with the hand shovel?  Does he fuss with each sentence as it comes, polishing each facet before moving along to another?  Does she just pour out the whole damn thing, all 300 pages of it, before putting it away for five months and then coming back to re-write?

Does she take a ten-minute break to play solitaire?  I do...

Anyway, short of becoming invisible and just standing over someone's shoulder to watch them write, I would love to have a video that was just a screen-capture of a good writer at work.  Just watching the words appear, go away, be replaced, be spelled correctly the second time.  Watching the thesaurus screen pop up, a word investigated.  Watching the distraction of looking something up on Google and following a couple of trivial side roads before getting back to the text.

Just imagine a screen capture of Joan Didion or Joe Coomer at work; what a privilege that would be to see.

I think it's a video with a very small market... but I know I'd watch it a few times.

I'm often interested in watching people at work, watching them make decisions.  What are their motives?  What are they trying to accomplish?  How much do they know ahead of time, and how much do they create on the fly?