Part 8
As I gradually taught myself the basics of using a computer, not long before the arrival of the first laptops, I went through a transitional phase. This means that for a while I would still do all my creative writing longhand. Then I would laboriously type it out with two fingers on an ancient desktop.
My rationale was that if I wrote the original in longhand, my preferred method of writing, I could then edit what I’d written in the much slower process, for me, of inputting it.
It was probably four years later when I finally had the courage to write my creative work directly onto a computer. By then my typing had improved considerably, so my earlier excuse that my typing was too slow for my writing no longer held water.
In fact, my longhand was way faster than most other people’s. Just to give you an idea, one day I decided to try to speak my stories into a recording device. I went to IBM, who put me in a group to whom they would demonstrate the advantages of using their Dictaphone. I was the only man in a group of twelve women. The demonstrator started by singling me out and asking if I would write longhand for one minute, in order to demonstrate the slowness of this method.
I wrote for a minute, then looked up to see the demonstrator looking at me incredulously. She asked how many words I had written. I added them up and it came to forty-two. The poor lady shook her head. Her demonstration was ruined. She reluctantly revealed that the average number per minute a person can do longhand is only about twelve. Needless to say, I never bought the Dictaphone.
Actually, though, my main reason for not buying a Dictaphone was I discovered that trying to dictate movie dialogue simply didn’t work. The reason was that when I wrote dialogue, if I had correctly created a back story for the character and he or she had become real in my mind, I could actually hear the dialogue in my head. But when I tried to dictate the dialogue into a machine, all I got was a stilted version of my own voice speaking someone else’s words.
However, things seemed to improve…I remember when my laptop arrived. It gave me the freedom to do again what I had always done successfully when I was strictly a longhand writer, namely to write in coffee bars and restaurants where refreshments were always on tap. Many writers prefer quiet and solitude. Some, like me, prefer the buzz and geniality of a public place, where they can switch off the actual sound and retreat into the special universe that they invent when they write.
Once again I enjoyed the ambiance of my favourite haunts. But, sadly, none of the vagaries of computer systems were solved as I continued to search for an easy-to-use technology to assist me. Adapting as best I could, I launched into the most productive writing phase of my career, and soon abandoned the idea of a device that would improve my life.
The years went by and I have to say I’ve had a long and successful run, except I confess with computers. But now that I’ve been privy to the extraordinary new world available in an ExoBrain, it seems as though I might have been fooled by my increasingly cranky and perverse machines.
With ExoTech’s language-controllable potential, you can actually talk to your computer and get an intelligent response. That’s what’s been missing – a whole half of the equation wasn’t there. An ExoBrain emulates human thought and data handling abilities.
After all these decades, it appears I may have been on the right track. I just wanted technology that could make my life easier, faster, better and more creative. You never know, I may even find a way to dictate my stories after all.
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.