Saturday night we watched the Shining again following in my recent fascination with Stephen King as a writer. At the same time I am reading his book On Writing and he mentions that he didn't realize that Jack Torrance an alcoholic ex-school teacher was actually based on himself until 1985 eight years after the book was published. But that's not what struck me when watching the movie. What struck me was the typewriter even though all Jack writes on it is "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."
Right now I am finishing up my first draft edit of my own book something that has taken me twice as long as I would have imagined. The first day I did an edit and a read through of the book I got through three chapters and since the book is 24 chapters long the math in me said it would only take a week to get through the rest of the book. But two weeks later I am just hoping to finish my first draft edit today instead of last week sometime. Simply put editing sucks.
But the reason the typewriter struck me while watching the movie is that I could have never written a novel using a typewriter. In just my first draft edit of my own manuscript I have added almost 4000 words and fixed numerous errors. I am just not a clean first draft kind of person. I know some people can hammer out a very clean first draft but that's not me and I am thinking I will need three or four drafts before I am even ready to submit to agents. At that point if I do get picked up I can see another draft being done with an editor.
Now try and imagine doing all those drafts and all those changes on a typewriter the mere thought gives me the shivers. I can't even begin to fathom how they pulled it off. Did you type it out then go at it with a red pen like an over zealous English teacher and then have to retype the whole darn thing once more.
Maybe I am just from a different era an era that had computers where one could adjust ones thoughts as one went along and hence I never learned the dire need to have a clean first draft The thought of having to type and edit a manuscript, a 250 page behemoth, on a typewriter scares me more than the Shining did.
Hey, Patrick!
ReplyDeleteYou are so right...editing SUCKS! It took me a little over six weeks to write my book. I couldn't stop. It was the most fulfulling, consuming, obsessive thing I have ever done. I finished in February. I am still editing. It is painful.
I did a search function for "actually," "up," (as in stood up, picked up, whatever verb you like + up), "kind of," and a couple of other extraneous modifiers that escape me at present. The MS was TWO pages shorter. Two whole pages of crap words.
I think aside from it just being meticulous it's also not fun because the fun part is creating the scenes and the story. Once you've done that, it's like you've scratched that particular itch. But if you want to get whatever story you loved writing down prettied up enough for someone else to love it, too, you have to do it. You just don'e have to like it.
Editing. Blech.
I did the same with the word 'so'. For some reason I liked to start a lot of sentences with the word 'so'.
ReplyDeleteI have only done the first four chapters searching for the word 'so' though as it takes forever to go through the book looking for one particular word especially if the word is only two letters and can be found in lots of other words.
I started writing Funny Ties a year ago, I wrote two pages then abandoned it for a year. I started in earnest in February and hammered the entire book out in just 2 and half months. But now that its done I want it to be done for real so editing is akin to hell.
I don't want to submit it to Literary Agents tell its fairly clean copy but editing drives me insane.