Life, Writing, Weirdness

I’m old enough that I remember what life was like before there was an “internet as we know it” or a public internet at all. I’m actually old enough to remember what life was like before there was a home computer in virtually every home. The careers I’ve had would look very, very different in the absence of the internet, and even more so if there were no computers ubiquitously available everywhere.

We got our first home computer in 1983, the Atari 800XL discussed as but never advertised as the Atari counter to the Commodore 64. Very, very similar capabilities but with a cartridge system built in. Computer and console in one.

The first time I went to university, we all had giant desktops that you could potentially kill someone with it if you dropped it off your desk and they were lying on the floor. In 1989, when I went to university the first time, we carried along several boxes worth of equipment that became my constant companion over the next few years, a Zenith 286. A lot of what I consider my earliest serious writing happened on that computer. I’m not sure how much of that era’s writing survived to get converted. The earliest dates I have on anything are a handful of word documents from 1995, but when I think about the overall primitiveness of that first computer, I do wonder sometimes what my writing process might have developed into in the absence of the internet and significant computer technology.

I know there are still authors alive today who came to prominence in that period. And they aren’t really all that much older than me (15 or 20 years doesn’t sound like that much anymore when you’re 55), within a couple of decades of my age. My favourite fantasy author, for example, Guy Gavriel Kay. published his first real work when I was a teenager in high school (1984 to 1986, The Fionavar Tapestry). Now, I’m not saying he didn’t have a computer to work on, but it’s possible. Not a lot of us had them in high school.

If he did, well, the computers we had at that point were itty bitty things that might have a word processor which wasn’t much more than the ability to type and have it stored on computer instead of paper. But it was a game changer that you could correct a typo on the spot.

Go back just a little bit before that, and it would have been very different. Before those word processors, before even the richest of people could afford a home computer, the writing world and a lot of the authors I grew up reading would have been working solely on a typewriter. Or even partly in longhand and on typewriter for the final draft that you were going to submit.

My meandering thought process today starts with, what if? What if this were 50-ish years ago in the mid-1970s and I had my trusty old, probably not electric, typewriter, access to all of the paper I could possibly want, and still had the burning desire, the burning need to tell stories. What would my writing process look like? Would I still work on the multiple draft system that I do? That multiple draft system was developed by trial and error and how I like to build stories, so I think that if I were the same essential person that I was when I started to take my writing seriously, the basic set of drafts would eventually look similar, at least in terms of number of drafts and which was for what.

But I’m starting with the assumption of converting the process I have now into something that doesn’t require a computer. That’s probably the wrong way to go about it.

When I was a kid, teenager, adult until sometime deep into my thirties, I pretty much was a pantser. I would sit down and write and whatever came out came out. I didn’t care if it didn’t work properly. I didn’t care that much about spelling. I didn’t care because I wasn’t working on a typewriter and didn’t need to worry about being able to read my own handwriting. I just wanted the story out of my skull.

So let’s start there. Let’s assume that my first draft is still just getting the story out of my head. Only now I have to do it either with a pencil or work carefully on a typewriter. (My typing skills would surely have improved quickly. Mistakes were much harder to deal with.) Let’s assume that I’m going to work on a typewriter consistently and build up.

Do I still learn to outline? Probably, and that’s probably not going to be done on a typewriter. The way my brain works, I feel like it would have wound up being a dedicated notebook with post-it notes and bits of colored tape sticking out of it all over the place, trying to keep the story straight, trying to keep the characters straight.

Okay, I have a notebook for an outline and then I have the first draft pouring out onto the page without looking too closely at typos or spacing.

If I look back at old movies where writers appeared on screen, they would then spend weeks or months going through that typewritten manuscript, picking apart every single thing with a red pen, and then go back and write the story again. This is kind of like my fix what’s broken draft, only far more physically involved and time consuming. Now the story is done for a second time.

Notebook, typewritten first draft with a lot of red ink, typewritten second draft.

That writer in the movie sits down with that red pen again and starts to ignore both forest and trees and work out the leaves, making sure each scene and paragraph and sentence says exactly the thing they want it to say. Careful word choices and sentence flow and scene structure are the province of the third draft, the make it pretty draft. Type it out again.

Notebook, typewritten first draft with a lot of red ink, typewritten second draft with some amount of circles and arrows and changed words in probably red ink and a carefully typewritten third draft.

Getting close.

At that point though, I’m willing to bet that I would have looked at things as time to give it to my agent (if I had one) or publisher (if I had one of those, and try to get one if I didn’t).

Publishing houses in the pre-computer era certainly had their own giant editorial staff, legions of copy editors, and people covering content and design. Books got printed. A great many books got printed. And there were a lot more publishers back then. A process would happen through which the writer got rewrites to do on that accepted novel. Oh sure, not every writer. And maybe most writers didn’t get major rewrites, but there would be little things to tidy up. And there would be little things that just got tidied up without bothering to consult the author. Because after all, the author was only the author, and the publishing house was taking all the risk, right?

But once that manuscript was in the hands of the agent and editor, the author was free to move on to the next story. But how long has that taken. How many reams of paper? How many typewriter ribbons? How many sleepless nights?

If I had to follow a structure like this, with all the extra time delays built in, all that extra physical labor built in, I don’t think that I could have written everything I’ve written in the time that I’ve been taking things seriously. (I have drafted, without exaggerating, more than four hundred stories. Not nearly all of these are at final draft status, though.) I have to conclude I wouldn’t have developed as much as a writer if I had to type everything out , go through my own typewritten pages with a red pen, type everything out a second time, make all the important little changes that put the prose into something very close to its close to final form, and finally type everything out a third time before passing it on to the next stage and starting the next story.

I like to say I’m a decent writer, but I’m a very good rewriter.

But if the rewriting was that labour intensive, I don’t think I would have gotten to be even as good as I am. And that makes it incredible to me when I think about some of the pulp era and golden age of science fiction era authors up into the 1950s, 60s, and 70s who just pounded out story after story, book after book, and kept going. All of those great science fiction authors that I grew up reading didn’t have access to the miracles of technology I’ve had. I’d like to think I am tapped into the same kind of expansive, imaginative vision. Even if that’s true, I have a much easier time with the editing process.

So not just for their visions and their storytelling ideas, those authors from an earlier age who pioneered the fields that I write in deserve an incredible amount of respect for their output. Getting a single story to a completed stage took a lot more labour than it does now.

And I didn’t even mention research.

Be well, everyone.