Hatrack River Writers Workshop: How'd they write with Pens?

This is topic How'd they write with Pens? in forum Open Discussions About Writing at Hatrack River Writers Workshop.

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Posted by TaleSpinner (Member # 5638) on :

This question was triggered by the "What do you write with?" thread and I thought I'd ask in a separate thread to avoid hijacking that one.

We all write with computers and if you're like me you write a paragraph or two, read it, change it, etc. I know about switching the internal editor off to get the first draft down but, sooner or later, we all go back and revise. It's easy to do that with a computer.

But before computers (BC!), with a pen or even a typewriter, revising must have been miserably tedious.

Did writers like Mark Twain (who was amongst the first to use a typewriter but had major works published from handwritten manuscripts) just revise laboriously? Or did they have brains the size of a planet, able to conceive sentences, paragraphs, whole chapters, writing with little need for revision?

Curious,
Pat

Posted by Robert Nowall (Member # 2764) on :

I'm told Leo Tolstoy's wife recopied every part of War and Peace seven times, working by candelight, painfully deciphering the Master's cribbed Russian handwriting into clean writing. All I could think of was "That poor woman!" 'cause I could never even bring myself to read the book...

I've heard of other writers who'd take scissors to a typewritten manuscript, slice it up sentence by sentence and even word by word, then paste them together.

Posted by Lynda (Member # 3574) on :

JK Rowling wrote all the HP books and her latest, "Beedle the Bard" by hand on legal pads, often while sitting in a coffee shop. So it's still done today. I'd say she has a brain as big as a motor home at the very least, but she also has TONS of notebooks full of notes as well as various incarnations of the books, or at least scenes from the books. Wouldn't it be fun to dig through her files?

She sometimes posts a copy of a page from her handwritten stuff on her website. And "Beedle the Bard," all seven copies, are handwritten. I couldn't possibly handwrite that much stuff without scribbling things out or my handwriting becoming illegible, not to mention the writer's cramp! Argh.

Posted by Alethea Kontis (Member # 3748) on :

Harry Turtledove and I had a conversation about this very thing -- he still handwrites out all his first drafts.

His reasoning is that when he's just hand-writing, he's getting out the plot, and all his thoughts, and moving along because he knows that when he goes back to type it in, THEN is when he will tidy up the prose and edit, edit, edit.

He's a huge proponent of "less is more", and apparently cuts mercilessly.

I completely understand his process -- it's one I used to use quite a bit once. Now I'm more worried about my tendency for procrastination, so the fewer steps I have toward getting a finished product, the better.

(In theory of course...tell that to all the post-it-notes scattered all over the tables and doors and walls of my house...)

[This message has been edited by Alethea Kontis (edited December 18, 2007).]

Posted by Marzo (Member # 5495) on :

Neal Stephenson handwrites his manuscripts too, if I recall correctly.

quote:

Did writers like Mark Twain (who was amongst the first to use a typewriter but had major works published from handwritten manuscripts) just revise laboriously? Or did they have brains the size of a planet, able to conceive sentences, paragraphs, whole chapters, writing with little need for revision?

I'm sure it was a little bit of both, and depended somewhat on the writer. Some have argued that authors (and intellectuals in general) of previous generations had brains much better exercised than ours, due to a more word-centric media, and more rigorous, structured education. They also didn't have TV and the internet to distract, and perhaps 'soften' them. So maybe they were better at holding and composing information without hard copy in front of them.

But, undoubtedly elbow-grease did play a large role. I'm trying to recall whose work it was, but in an English literature textbook there were a few examples of original pages from a 17th or 18th century poet's work, and there were quite a lot of margin-scribbles going on. I'm sure it wasn't unique in that, as well.

I'm less curious about the mental feat so much as the physical one. Maybe the ease of typing has turned my arm muscles into pulp, but handwriting for more than a little while seems to age my body by fifty years. Joint pains, muscle cramps, etc.

I tried handwriting at one point because I like the idea of being connected to the vast majority of writers who Came Before(tm) (and I love notebooks, but that's another obsession), but I can't write as quickly as I can type, so it slows me down if I happen to get on a roll. And then, the writer's cramp.

I think handwriters, by choice or necessity, are just a different breed.

Posted by JeanneT (Member # 5709) on :

Somewhere I saw photos of the excrutiating editing that James Joyce went through. I can't even imagine the work that authors like that went through.

Posted by goatboy (Member # 2062) on :

I read an article about Twain and the typewriter not long ago. Indeed he was one of the first to own one, but hated it so bad he traded it off for a saddle. After awhile it returned to his possession and he sent it off to someone else. He was not a fan.

As to revising by typwriter and by hand, I've done both. On a typewritten draft, I double space and make any corrections by hand in the extra space and along the margins. For handwritten work, I usually place a circled number in the spot I want the new material to be inserted and then write the new material on the back of the sheet. Either way, when the next fresh draft is created, the extra material gets inserted.

Posted by Lynda (Member # 3574) on :

In the early days of my writing (which was in the mid-to-late 1980's) I wrote on a computer, but when it came to editing, I was still doing the "cut and paste" method - literally, cutting things apart and taping them together in a different order. Once my writing skills improved, I didn't need to do this - and I'd learned how to cut and paste without losing stuff on the computer by then, too.

Posted by Robert Nowall (Member # 2764) on :

I can't do a handwritten MS of any length---my wrists start to get to me by the end of the page. I try to do five hundred words a day on the typewriter and / or computer, but that's more of a trick to keep the creative juices flowing, not about how my wrists bother me.

On Mark Twain and typewriters...the early models were not what you would call easy to use. The QWERTY keyboard came later (but not by much), and there are more efficient arrangements like Dvorak that you can lay your hands on (in both senses).

Posted by TaleSpinner (Member # 5638) on :

Here's what Mark Twain had to say about his Remington in 1904:

"That early machine was full of caprices, full of defects--devlish ones. It had as many immoralities as the machine of to-day (sic) has virtues."

He could have been describing a computer!

http://etext.virginia.edu/railton/yankee/cymach4.html

I am amused to realize that I had forgotten why we double space manuscripts!

Thank for all the interesting contributions,
Pat

Posted by arriki (Member # 3079) on :

back in the early days of the Jurassic, I hand wrote and used an electric typewriter for the second draft, double-spacing all the way. When I bought my first computer, an Apple II+ with 48K of memory(!), it was incredible. No step upwards in computer software can come close to the difference writing on a computer made.

(I say proudly) I was the first person to take a computer to Clarion! Imagine!

Posted by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury (Member # 59) on :

quote:
I had forgotten why we double space manuscripts!

It wasn't just for our own editing, though. Editors need spaces between the lines so they can write notes to the typesetter.

Don't stop double-spacing just because you aren't using a typewriter any more.