Thursday, June 13, 2019

In case you wondered …

… What the 39,933 Items on Peter Matthiessen's Computer Mean for the Art of Biography | Literary Hub. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

 Everything on a computer is, being intangible, also more ephemeral. That may seem obvious to say, but the result for somebody like me can be profound. Matthiessen wrote numerous drafts of his two final novels (one published, one not) as well as the unfinished memoir. He duplicated files and renamed them. But then he would go back to earlier drafts and tinker in those, making cuts and additions; then he would save these as yet more duplicates, creating, in effect, simultaneous alternate timelines on a single project. On paper his writing process is relatively easy to follow; on computer, impossible.

1 comment:

  1. A prudent programmer, working on a project of any complexity, uses "version control". These days that usually seems to be "git"--a bit of Googling for "GitHub" will yield a lot of hits. The code that I have in git repositories is surely duller than anything Peter Matthiessen wrote after he started shaving; but I can tell you exactly what the changes were and when I made them.

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