METHOD AND THE MEDIUM
The relationship between writers and technology has often been antagonistic

Before information technology, there was technology, and writers had a relationship with it. Kipling favoured "well-grounded Indian Ink" and "a camel-hair brush" for deleting text. Getting writer's cramp in the midst of What Maisie Knew, Henry James hired a shorthand typist, and his style changed accordingly. He became so used to the sound of the machine he couldn't work without it. According to Hugh Kenner, author of The Mechanic Muse, some of Ezra Pound's staccato imagist poetry "could only have been composed on a typewriter".

And so to today. Information technology can be the friend of writers, but more often it is their worst enemy. Say you are a novelist. You should be thinking of language and technique. That is your calling, or your business, depending on how you look at it. In either case, you should be trying to hang on to the informing impulse that blew life into your idea. That original "inspiration" is how you will add to the stock of human knowledge. It's a gift. Do you receive it graciously? No: you think of fonts and hard drives, software packages and printer cartridges. Or you footle around the internet, calling it research.

All this is wrong-headed: obsessing about the technology of literary production is generally displacement activity for production itself. Like the washing-up or ironing - astonishingly satisfying when you are trying to start a book - fiddling about with the computer can be another way of putting off the day when you grapple with the blank page.

Nowadays writers are more likely, one might think, to be struggling with the blank screen. But of course, the days when computer screens are blank are long gone. Windows and other graphical user interfaces might offer enlightenment to some, but for one such as myself they are just another distraction: something else between the writer and language.

This is why, for many years now, for writing fiction I have used an old pre-Windows PC running a very simple ASCII-based program called Xywrite and nothing else. Xywrite is as "naked" a word-processing package as you can get: the closest thing possible to a blank screen. Its point, for me, is to avoid the drift away from the production of words, something which modern WP packages encourage with their ever-increasing ancillary features. After all, bells and whistles are not appropriate instruments with which to serenade the Muse.

All that notwithstanding, there are times when one does want the most up-to-date software as a writer...For filmscripts, Final Draft, now in its sixth release, is your only man. Many studios will now only accept scripts written with this program, which immediately formats your material into character, dialogue, action, shot, transition and so on. The peculiarities of script layout, with character's name centred over justified centred text, and the action range left, are very laborious to achieve using an ordinary word processing package.

Another format which is difficult to achieve with Word or its equivalents is the simultaneous video/audio layout used for many TV documentaries. It works like this: on the left of the page one has a Video column (Open on writer at desk, various shots) and on the right an Audio column (Presenter: Every writer has that moment when they must lay the first elusive worlds on the screen). A sister program to Final Draft, Final Draft AV enables one to set out text like this, or some modulation of it. It will no doubt become the industry standard as Final Draft has in the film business.

Both the Final Draft programs have many other useful features and tools, but one must be wary of being beguiled by them. In the end, it is still just the writer and the words. Computers and software are cultural artefacts, and while they can sometimes be inspirations in themselves, they should not be allowed to dominate cultural production. On the other hand, the modern writer must engage with information technology. Plain anxiety isn't a useful response. Nor - and it's much more common among literary folk - is sophisticated anxiety. One needn't disdain IT to be wary of it.