A Lost Art Found

In her years at school, now long past, Agnes worked hardest on, and achieved her best marks in penmanship. It was an accomplishment that she had been proud of, then, as she still is now. In present times, however, she believes that, with computer technology being the main vehicle of writing, penmanship is a lost art. And she feels lost along with it, that both her and her handwriting are creatures of the past.

Unsurprisingly, she had become an elementary school teacher, and had taught many children how to write, a task that became harder and harder as student computer use grew, and her career and her energy waned.

Now that she is retired, she gets her greatest pleasure out of writing short stories. Her creativity in story lines, vocabulary and careful editing are intimately linked with her process of writing by hand, not by typing or keyboarding, although she is reasonably good at both of those skills in terms of speed and accuracy. Agnes feels that such a method is alright for her basic communication, but not her creative writing, where editing is more than just being accurate grammatically and spelling correctly.

Her biggest problem involves submitting her work to potential publishers. Almost every publisher requires that a computer file be sent in. And those very few that permit her to mail in her short story will only accept a ‘keyboarded’ copy. Unfortunately, on a few occasions, it wasn’t in the instructions that handwritten copies were not accepted, and she never heard back from the publisher, even though she had sent the story with a self-addressed and stamped envelope as was requested.

A large part of her problem is essentially this.  Agnes can only edit her work when she is engaged in the relatively slow process of handwriting.  It just does not seem right for her to speed through editing on a keyboard. For her it does not bring about new ideas, which she enjoys experiencing in her final edit.

A Potential Solution

Her latest story is one that she especially likes.  It bears the title “Dancing in the Snow”. And she is generally critical of her own work.  She submitted it, handwritten, to a journal that accepted mailed in entries. She thought that what she wrote would be a good fit with the prompt that she had responded to. Agnes e-mailed them a few days later, explaining why she was not sending them a computer file like they had told the writers to do, but had sent them a handwritten copy instead. At least they e-mailed her back, even though the message was that they would not consider her work unless it was sent in the typed up form that they had specified.

She feels strongly that she has to submit this story. Agnes is confident that she has a good chance of winning one of the top three monetary prizes, or at least be short-listed for publication. However, she still refuses to engage in the final writing of her work with just her fingers, not her whole hand. Agnes felt that she has painted herself in a corner, and has no route to escape her dilemma But then she has an idea.

While there is no one she knows that she can confidently have do the job for her. Agnes’ friends are generally worse with a computer than she is, and could make some sloppy mistakes that might cost her a publication. There is, however, a company in town that does computer work for seniors. She had been at the local Senior Centre when they had made a presentation. She had come for the lunch and the company, not the presentation, but she stayed for it anyway. She felt that the people working for the company were cocky, way too sure of themselves, like some seven-year-olds she had taught. But hiring one of their staff for the job seems the only practical solution to her dilemma.

Their strip mall office is just a short walk from her place, so Agnes is taking a handwritten copy of her short story, that she put it into a large envelope. She walks briskly there, as if the place will disappear if she is too slow in getting there.  She believes that a computer processed copy of this particular story is going to be her ticket to her first paying publication. 

It turns out that it is good that she walked into the office feeling confident, because the condescending manner in which the staff treated her there, especially the one who was going to do the job for her, would have been even harder to deal with had she been sure of herself. 

A Dastardly Plot is Devised

After hearing Agnes talking about how good her chances were in the contest, and about how she was rarely ever contacted by a publisher when she didn’t win such a contest, Larry, the young man whom she had hired to type up her story, came up with an idea with which he could possibly make even more money than he had already over-charged Agnes. He typed up the story, actually enjoying reading it as he did so, and submitted it under his name, with his e-mail address.

A Month Later

The journal that Agnes’ story was sent to promised submitting writers that they would get back to them with the results of their judging within a month. And so they did. Larry received an e-mail at that time congratulating him on the success of his story. He had won second prize.

Agnes checked the journal website every day, hoping to see her name and the title of her story on the winners’ list.  When that day finally came, she was pleasantly surprized, and then shocked by what she saw. There is the title “Dancing in the Snow”, but the name of the writer is given as Larry Lapper. He had stolen her story!

Agnes wishes that she could phone the company that produced the journal, but that was not an option. So she comes up with another strategy. She scans the story and attaches it to her e-mail. She writes, “Do you remember seeing a story that looked like this?”

The very next day she receives a phone call. The person she talks to tells her that she believes that Agnes is the original author of the prize-winning story. She had looked at the original copy some weeks past, and thought then that the penmanship was beautiful. She hadn’t read the story, but she remembers the handwriting itself very well.  Plus she knows that there is  no believable way that Agnes could have received a copy of the story before it was even published.

So, when they published both the print and on-line copies of the journal, Agnes’ name was given as the author.  And, as they paid upon publication, she, not Larry, received the money. And when they sent out their next call for stories, it included a statement that “If your penmanship is really good, we will accept a handwritten copy of your story.” Readers would in successive contests be able to read several of Agnes’ stories, and get a taste of her penmanship scanned onto the printed and the on-line pages