“Take any writer you want in the 19th century: they wrote with quill pens, dipping a piece of goose feather in ink and writing. And yet we read those novels today, and if we’re sensitive to them, we respond to them with an immediacy that is stronger than anything written today on a word processor.”
— Walter Murch, American film editor and sound designer born in 1943, with a career stretching back to 1969, including work on Apocalypse Now, The Godfather I, II, and III and American Graffiti.
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Gee, Walter, if it’s really that hopeless, why haven’t more of us started writing with quill pens and ink? Or maybe we should just all quit?
Writing is hard work. It’s solitary. And most writers do it because they feel compelled to write. They never achieve wealth, fame and acclaim. That’s not why they write.
But someone has to be the next Michael Connelly or Lee Child or Mark Twain. Good luck to the next writer to reach the top of that mountain — even if, like me, you write with a computer instead of a quill pen and ink.
