About the author: Dean Taylor
I completed my initial apprenticeship 45 years ago, writing all kinds of materials, and working with computers to write. I was employed in Hollywood as an executive of a movie production company. My work involved writing business plans, movie proposals, scripts, and editing and making script revisions. My secretary was a cracker-jack stenographer, and speedy typist. She could rattle away all day at 100 to 125 words per minute. The problem was I was so busy supervising the production of 30 to 40 films at one time that I didn’t have time during the day to edit or revise what I had dictated or written at the office. I took reams of stuff home every night and weekend.
At first, I tried cutting and pasting to get the order of my ideas in a logical sequence. It was a mess. I often wanted to insert a transition, or rephrase the way I had expressed my thoughts. I was slogging along one night when a friend stopped by. He was an aerospace executive on his way home from a meeting at the IBM office in San Fernando Valley where he had seen a demonstration of a computer word processing system on a huge 360 Model main frame computer. He saw what I was doing and he said, “I think you’d better see this thing. You might want to use it.
I went to the demonstration and I was instantly hooked on computers. I signed a service agreement and took a dumb terminal home and worked on line connected to a huge and powerful computer to help with my problem. I’ve built computers, fixed them, and more importantly have used all kinds to write for years. I’ve written far more than I could have without one. They speed things up and make writing easy.
I can’t wait to get up in the morning and write. My friends tell me I am crazy. Well, they’re right. I am crazy about writing because it’s so satisfying. Everyday I look over my day’s output. Most of the time I can pat my self on the back and say, “I did that, and it’s darned good.” Then there are those days when nothing goes well. When that happens I take time off and read or take long walks.
At the moment I am working on several books of my own. If I have an idea for a book, or I think of a story, I just sit and write it down and save it.
