Read Who Made Stevie Crye? for Free Online

ON PAPER BELLOWING THE STENCHFUL STIFFNESS OF BULLSHIT, BULLSHIT, BULLSHIT!!!

    Stevie banged the on/off key with the side of her hand and yanked the page out. She could not unclog her brain. This string of alliterative raillery represented her most productive burst of the morning. If only she could achieve such fluency typing news stories and feature columns . . . and, yes, book proposals. Some writers could just let their fingers fly, but she . . . well, she could not unclog her brain. Shitting bricks, Ted had called this kind of labor, but he had always stayed with the struggle until victoriously spent.
    It’s the typewriter, Stevie suddenly thought. Typewriters are passé.
    This thought amused her. She knew she was rationalizing her failure to get going, using the typewriter as a scapegoat—but, at the moment, the rationalization, irrational as it was, appealed to her. She threw away her last botched proposal page, along with its codicil of free-associational abuse, and left her desk.
    At the discolored Dearborn heater, she warmed her back, her hands clasped behind her, her eyes fixed on the recalcitrant instrument of her stuckness . It worked perfectly, but it also frustrated her every effort to overcome her block. It exuded a smug fractiousness. It grinned a bleak analphabetical grin. It withheld the words it had an innate power—yea, obligation —to surrender.
    “Typewriters are passé,” Stevie informed the machine.
    Over the last few years, lots of writers—some of them only mildly affluent—had begun using word processors, computer systems with display consoles and printer hookups. The Ledger newsroom in Columbus, which Stevie occasionally visited to discuss free-lance assignments with the managing editor, now had more video consoles than typewriters. Reporters could emend their copy by deleting errors, opening up their texts for insertions, moving entire paragraphs from one place to another, all without recourse to strikeovers, ballpoint pens, Liquid Paper, or flaky little tabs of Ko-Rec-Type. Word processors willy-nilly permitted a writer to overcome blocks and increase production. Although these nifty systems now cost about three thousand dollars (at least), you could take investment and depreciation write-offs and so bid a tearless permanent farewell to your typewriter. Stevie envisioned a day when only die-hard sentimentalists and penniless beginners would sit down at their Remingtons, Royals, Smith-Coronas, and PDE Exceleriters. These poor benighted souls would seem as backward and disadvantaged as a court stenographer with a Venus No. 2 lead pencil. And that day was probably not far off.
    A fantasy. Stevie did not really believe that a word processor would solve her problem. She was stuck. Whether working with a goose-quill nub or an Apple computer, she would be just as stuck. Dickens, Collins, Eliot, Trollope—all the great Victorian novelists—they had never even seen a typewriter, much less the blank unblinking eye of a word processor, and yet they had produced staggering quantities of work, some of it brilliant. Her problem was not technological, it was emotional and mental.
    I’m stuck, damn it, I’m stuck. And I’m stuck because I don’t have any confidence in this stupid proposal. It’s a dumb idea for a dumb book, and no matter how I dress it up or attempt to prettify it, it’s going to remain a dumb idea. A word processor could not possibly play ’Enry ’Iggins to my illiterate Eliza Doolittle of an idea.
    Or could it?
    Stevie returned to her Exceleriter, rolled in a clean sheet of paper, and imagined the touch of a single button lifting several paragraphs of text out of the machine’s (nonexistent) random-access memory. Another touch and an instance of muddy diction gave way to just the right word. Yet another and the sequence of her arguments rearranged itself in a truly forceful pattern. Her basic idea was not at fault—think of all the dumb ideas that had giggled or panted