The Telegraph celebrates the ability to see an author's writing process through their manuscripts, something they fear they'll not be able to celebrate much longer with Microsoft Word, Google Docs, and the like.
From the piece...
Although manuscripts may yield the odd ugly truth about a writer's style, they are still a beautiful thing to behold – and one which risks becoming increasingly rare in today's digital world. The two draft chapters of Persuasion that will be on display show neat, looped writing, occasionally scoured out with thick, angry black lines. It is a visceral thrill to see a favourite writer's thought processes on paper; to realise that the sentences etched on to the page with such elegant certainty were scribbled out and scrawled back in again. It draws a direct line between the book on your bedside table and the woman who sat frowning at her desk, nearly 200 years ago.
Manuscripts are also a reminder of the vastly differing approaches that writers take to their art. For every perfectionist Flaubert, who could spend a week agonising over one page of crabbed handwriting, there is a Kerouac, who tapped out On the Road in three giddy weeks of spontaneous prose. As with Austen, the paragraph breaks were inserted into the 120-foot-long typewritten scroll by an editor; in both cases, only the manuscript points to the original breathlessness.
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