From Quill to Keyboard



  FROM QUILL TO KEYBOARD

  Eight essays about writing

  Joan Curry

  Blog: https://joancurry.blogspot.com/

  copyright Joan Curry 2011

  ISBN: 978-0-473-19822-0

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Preface

  Get it down, then get it right

  Quill or keyboard?

  What's stopping you?

  For love or money?

  Writing for hire

  Writing non-fiction

  Creative writing courses

  Make a book or two

  PREFACE

  Writers are always talking to each other over coffee or lunch about what they do, how they do it, what concerns them, and how they manage their working lives. The eight essays in this short book cover some of the topics discussed, such as what gets us started, how we balance professional and practical matters, the value of creative writing courses, and other aspects of the writing process. The ideas have been developed during many years of writing, and teaching creative writing to adult students. This last has been a most rewarding experience because it has been a two-way street. I have learned at least as much from my students as I hope they have learned from me.

  These essays have been previously published elsewhere as separate pieces, and I have collected them together now as an adjunct to the how-to manual called "Writing, a practical guide" which is also available as an ebook.

  GET IT DOWN, THEN GET IT RIGHT

  I had a friend who regularly, over the years, drove me crazy.

  She had an incredibly fertile imagination. She had plenty of energy. She had absolutely no self-discipline.

  She used to write two pages of a story and it would be all over the place. There were characters half-drawn, glimmers of plot that might or might not go anywhere, snatches of dialogue about nothing much. The sentences were hardly sentences at all, just fragments. The only punctuation marks she bothered about were commas and full stops, and they were scattered randomly through the text like shotgun pellets. She apparently had no sense of the rhythm of words or the way they should chime together. Her spelling was atrocious but she couldn't be bothered to look up words in the dictionary.

  She was too busy writing.

  Worse than all this was the fact that the stories, such as they were, were more a series of disconnected jottings. They didn't start anywhere in particular and rather than end, they simply petered out.

  Sometimes when three or four of us writers got together to talk over coffee, she showed us what she had done. What do you think, she asked. We were appalled, and we gave her a hard time. It’s a mess, we told her. These characters are paper dolls, we said. The dialogue doesn’t tell us anything, and do you really think this might be a plot?

  Her answer was to defend herself enthusiastically, to tell us in considerable detail about the characters, what they were like, where they were, what they were doing, what they felt, what was going to happen to them. Her mind flitted from one thing to another, rambled down promising lanes, ran into dead-ends and shot off in another direction altogether. We tore our hair. How can you work like this, we moaned, we who picked morosely at our work, fretted when it didn’t go well, and proceeded slowly, oh so slowly.

  It seems that we have done my friend a great wrong over the years. She had, over and over again, taken her two or three pages of scrappy nonsense away and put them into a large - by now a very large - cardboard box and started on something else. The next time we met for coffee she would show us something new that she had done, and again we would shout at her in exasperation.

  And one day we begged her: why don’t you think it out properly and actually finish one of these stories of yours?

  Her answer? “I don’t think” she said calmly. “I just write. I just sit down with a pad and pencil and let it all come tumbling out.”

  It so happens that this was just after I had read a book called “No Plot? No Problem” by Chris Baty. He is a young American who decided that he would write a novel in one calendar month. It was to be 50,000 words long, there was to be no editing or much in the way of pre-planning, and the object was to aim for exuberant imperfection. In order to circumvent the fear of making mistakes and feelings of incompetence, he would tackle daunting, paralysis-inducing challenges and give himself permission to go ahead and make those mistakes.

  Baty and a few like-minded friends got together, decided on a month, and went for it. That was in July 1999, with 21 people, only six of whom completed the task. The next year they moved the month to November - northern hemisphere winter of course, a good time for writing. NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) was born. By November 2003, 25,000 people from more than 30 countries participated.

  In his book, Baty sets out the procedure in a lively, amusing and down-to-earth fashion. He urges writers to go for it, however scary it might seem, and explains how the helter-skelter nature of the exercise works to free up the creative muscles. The idea was to start typing (or writing) on day 1 and finish on day 30, with 50,000 words under the belt. The quality of the words was immaterial, only the quantity was important.

  Back to my friend. I challenged her to write a novel of 50,000 words (I didn’t give her a time limit, for a variety of good reasons). I said that if she did it, I would edit it and make it tidy. I felt absolutely safe that it would never happen, given her track record.

  Six months later she appeared with a folder of pages containing 70,000 words. She also brought several files of loose pages which contained extra bits of narrative which my friend, true to type, had written as fresh ideas had occurred to her. They all, separately and severally, belonged somewhere in the main manuscript but had been added, like balloons, because they expanded the narrative in unforeseen ways after the story had, as it were, moved on. As well as the wad of paper there were three or four floppy disks which contained different versions of the narrative, as well as scraps of afterthoughts and insertions.

  The whole package was in a terrible mess. But here’s the thing: it was all there. There were characters, they did things, they talked to each other, they fought, they loved and they cried. My friend had just sat down and started writing. She didn’t stop to think. And the next day she started again - not always from where she had left off either - but anywhere. And the next day … and the next… There were inconsistencies, there were gaping holes, there were absurdities, but they were all there, on the paper and on the disks.

  All I had to do was tidy it up.

  It was a mammoth task, made more difficult because my friend kept sending enthusiastic emails because she had rewritten a section, or expanded a scene. But the rough draft got done in spite of everything and after that it just needed making good.

  We all learned valuable lessons from this experience. It was glaringly obvious that you can’t edit a manuscript if it doesn’t yet exist, and the best, and most productive, way to create a manuscript is to sit down and let it all come tumbling out.

  Get it down first, and then get it right.

  QUILL OR KEYBOARD?

  Sometimes a group of us writers meet to talk about what we're doing. And when we do, someone always raises a writing problem. Or poses a question. Or presents a challenge. That is usually what writers do, because we are always thinking about our current projects and the problems associated with them. And we naturally like to discuss these with those who know what we are talking about.

  So, the other day someone asked what seemed like an idle question: do you remember the days of writing the first draft by hand? Someone said, “still do” and the rest of us stared at him in amazement. “Helps me to think” he added, a little defensively. We nodded kindly. Then we began talking about the process of how a piec
e of writing starts, and develops, and grows, and finally emerges fully formed and complete.

  Of course it starts with thinking. We all did it in the old days - wrote the first drafts on paper using pens with tooth marks at the ends. That was because we only had typewriters which couldn’t spell, proceeded doggedly from one letter to the next, refused to go backwards or make space for an extra word, let alone a paragraph or a page.

  Mistakes could be rubbed out if they were small enough, otherwise whole pages had to be retyped when the inevitable second and third thoughts surfaced. Writing by hand saved a lot of retyping in those days, which by the way were not all that long ago, but it was a slow and laborious process.

  At least we had ball-point pens, although I always preferred fountain pens (the kind you filled with ink from a bottle). I