Recently Dick King-Smith, the author of The Sheep-Pig (the book on which the film Babe was based) died. Reporting his death on the BBC, the newsreader described how he wrote his manuscripts out in longhand with a pen before typing them up with one finger on an ancient typewriter.
Regular readers of this blog will know that I’ve got a bit of a thing about people who fetishize the pen as the only suitable tool for writing. In this case it wasn’t so much the fact that the BBC felt it needed to include this piece of information that annoyed me, it was the reverent tone with which the newscaster spoke. I wanted to hurl the radio across the room and scream:
‘USING A PEN DOESN’T MAKE IT BETTER!’
What counts is the storytelling, the style, the voice, the ear for dialogue, the ability to visualize, to paint word-pictures, to capture the essence of character, to construct compelling plots, to use images to convey and heighten meaning, to weave the disparate elements of a writer’s craft together into a coherent unity. But it doesn’t matter a hoot whether you do this with a pen, or a computer or whether you write it in your own blood on the whitewashed wall of your study with a paintbrush made from unicorn hair
Well, maybe the unicorn hair might make a difference but not the rest.
I like to write on a computer for a number of reasons. A very significant one is the fact that I type very quickly and I write very slowly. In fact my hand starts to hurt if I have to write more than a paragraph with a pen; and I make mistakes. I’m not even very good at signing my name consistently.
I used to be able to write when I was at school and even when I was at university. There were no personal computers then so I had no alternative. But as soon as PCs came on the market in Britain I bought one and I immediately loved it. I could cut and paste text, navigate with ease through a document, compare different versions of a passage with the click of a mouse. I had found an extension for my brain.
A few days ago I got a Kindle as a birthday present and I am similarly enamoured. It’s not just a convenient way of reading e-books, though it does that perfectly. It’s also a much better way to read manuscripts. Instead of burning your eyeballs out scouring back-lit text for a missing comma, or shuffling a heap of printed pages around your desk until you drop the lot and have to spend the next ten minutes putting them back in order, you can do the whole thing in comfort.
Every writer has to spend a lot of time proof-reading, reading to make editorial changes, reading your way back into a story that circumstances have made you put aside for a period, or just reading to see whether what you've written actually works. A Kindle allows you to do all that with consummate ease.
Today, for example, I had to look at some work in progress from my apprentice of this year. (I’ve previously blogged about my participation in the Apprenticeships In Fiction scheme here.) It was a hundred-page, single-spaced outline. I knew it would be very well-executed because this year's apprentice is an impressive individual. All the same, I didn’t fancy reading it on my computer so I sent the document to my Kindle email address. Just doing that converts it into a document that can be read on the Kindle. A few moments later I was able to sit back on my sofa and give my apprentice’s work the attention it deserved.
You can also annotate a text on the Kindle and then export your notes to your PC if you need to. I had a few notes to make about this manuscript so I inserted digital bookmarks wherever I needed to refer back to the text and summarised my concerns. Admittedly, it’s not easy writing using the Kindle’s miniscule keyboard but the more you do something, the better you get at it.
It’s just a tool, like a PC, like a biro, like a quill, like a stylus and a wax tablet but it’s a very sophisticated tool and one that integrates very well into my working methods. Of course I shall only use it when the moon is waxing. I mean no true author would write under a waning moon, now would they?
Showing posts with label computers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label computers. Show all posts
Monday, 10 January 2011
Tuesday, 18 August 2009
Plus Ca Change, Plus C'est La Meme Chose
Well my Italian dream is over and I’m back in London. One thing I won’t miss is The Great Anointing which I went through every morning. Since, genetically, I am really designed for the mild, wet climate of the west of Ireland, I had to start every day by coating myself with vast quantities of sun block which had the effect of making me look even whiter than I am. This, coupled with my Marks and Spencers hat marked me out as a tourist as effectively as if I’d had ‘Englishman on holiday’ tattooed across my forehead.
As a result, waiters and shopkeepers invariably spoke to me in English, despite my best efforts to talk to them in their native language. I did get a few opportunities to speak Italian however, including one whole afternoon when I had lunch with an Italian friend and was even obliged a couple of times to use the subjunctive. My Italian teacher, whose name is Laura, would have been extremely pleased. She is very strict about the subjunctive.
I mentioned this to a frighteningly intelligent friend of mine who has more degrees than a thermometer and writes books, the titles of which are completely beyond my comprehension. He frowned and said, ‘What’s the subjunctive?’ So, in case you share his grammatical blind spot, the subjunctive is a tense* that indicates doubt or hypothesis. The example commonly given is ‘If I were you’. Normally we don’t say ‘I were happy’, we say ‘I was happy’. So why do we say ‘If I were you’? Because we are using the subjunctive, of course.
Actually, nowadays, most people probably say ‘If I was you’ because, as Laura regularly points out with a curl of the lip, the use of the subjunctive in English is dying out. She clearly regards this as a sign of the degeneracy of the English language.
I don’t agree. I just see it as a sensible process of rationalisation. This is the way I look at it. If someone says to you…(Oh dear! Strictly speaking I should have written ‘If someone were to say to you’ since I am now hypothesising) – anyway, to hell with that. If someone says to you ‘If I were you’, there is no element of doubt, is there? You don’t think to yourself, ‘Gosh! Is he me? Am I really someone else?’ No, you understand that the person speaking is simply giving you a piece of advice. There’s no confusion; so why do you need to use a special tense?
The gradual disappearance of the subjunctive is one of the things that is often referred to as a kind of litmus test of grammatical awareness by people who complain about a decline in editing standards. Personally, I don’t think there’s been any such decline at all. My editor is prepared to accept ‘If I were you’ or ‘If I was you’. She knows the difference but accepts that the English language is in a constant state of change.
Since my return to England I have discovered that I am now in Wikipedia However, according to my entry I live in London with my wife and two daughters. This only goes to show what happens when there is no overall editorial control of a text. My daughters are in fact both married with homes of their own. Indeed, my elder daughter is thirty-one today. (Happy Birthday, Em!) Which is, coincidentally, about the age I feel inside.
Unfortunately my birth certificate is unequivocal on this point. I am, in reality, fifty-five and have been writing children’s books for more than a quarter of a century. If I delve into what Shakespeare called ‘the deep backward and abysm of time’ I can even remember one of the Great Milestones Of Publishing.
I had been invited to have lunch with my editor at Oxford University Press. We were just leaving the building for a restaurant when Ron, my editor, was hailed by another editor (whose name I never caught) but who was clearly enormously excited about something.
‘Look at this, Ron!’ the Other Editor said, taking a sheaf of paper out of a large brown envelope. ‘It’s just arrived from America.'
‘What is it?’ asked Ron. ‘A set of proofs?’
The Other Editor shook his head. ‘It’s a manuscript,’ he said.
‘But it’s practically perfect!’ exclaimed Ron in amazement. ‘You could publish it as it stands.’
‘I know,’ said the Other Editor. Speaking almost reverently he added, ‘It’s been done on a word processor.’
Ron thumbed through the manuscript in awed silence.
'This is the future,’ the Other Editor assured him. ‘They’ll all be like this soon.’
Ron shook his head in dismay. ‘Then we’ll be out of a job,’ he observed gloomily.
The Other Editor was right. Pretty soon every manuscript they received (including mine) was being produced on a computer. However, Ron’s gloomy prediction that there would be no more need for editors proved untrue. As in the English language, some things (like the subjunctive) change, but others remain the same.
Real editing, as opposed to straightforward copy editing, is about vision, about understanding the audience, about recognising a voice, developing a story, encouraging talent and fitting all this into the overall strategy of the publishing house. I think there are as many people who can do that today as there always have been.
* Of course strictly speaking it's a mood not a tense as I remembered after writing this but I'm afraid I'm not up to explaining the difference
As a result, waiters and shopkeepers invariably spoke to me in English, despite my best efforts to talk to them in their native language. I did get a few opportunities to speak Italian however, including one whole afternoon when I had lunch with an Italian friend and was even obliged a couple of times to use the subjunctive. My Italian teacher, whose name is Laura, would have been extremely pleased. She is very strict about the subjunctive.
I mentioned this to a frighteningly intelligent friend of mine who has more degrees than a thermometer and writes books, the titles of which are completely beyond my comprehension. He frowned and said, ‘What’s the subjunctive?’ So, in case you share his grammatical blind spot, the subjunctive is a tense* that indicates doubt or hypothesis. The example commonly given is ‘If I were you’. Normally we don’t say ‘I were happy’, we say ‘I was happy’. So why do we say ‘If I were you’? Because we are using the subjunctive, of course.
Actually, nowadays, most people probably say ‘If I was you’ because, as Laura regularly points out with a curl of the lip, the use of the subjunctive in English is dying out. She clearly regards this as a sign of the degeneracy of the English language.
I don’t agree. I just see it as a sensible process of rationalisation. This is the way I look at it. If someone says to you…(Oh dear! Strictly speaking I should have written ‘If someone were to say to you’ since I am now hypothesising) – anyway, to hell with that. If someone says to you ‘If I were you’, there is no element of doubt, is there? You don’t think to yourself, ‘Gosh! Is he me? Am I really someone else?’ No, you understand that the person speaking is simply giving you a piece of advice. There’s no confusion; so why do you need to use a special tense?
The gradual disappearance of the subjunctive is one of the things that is often referred to as a kind of litmus test of grammatical awareness by people who complain about a decline in editing standards. Personally, I don’t think there’s been any such decline at all. My editor is prepared to accept ‘If I were you’ or ‘If I was you’. She knows the difference but accepts that the English language is in a constant state of change.
Since my return to England I have discovered that I am now in Wikipedia However, according to my entry I live in London with my wife and two daughters. This only goes to show what happens when there is no overall editorial control of a text. My daughters are in fact both married with homes of their own. Indeed, my elder daughter is thirty-one today. (Happy Birthday, Em!) Which is, coincidentally, about the age I feel inside.
Unfortunately my birth certificate is unequivocal on this point. I am, in reality, fifty-five and have been writing children’s books for more than a quarter of a century. If I delve into what Shakespeare called ‘the deep backward and abysm of time’ I can even remember one of the Great Milestones Of Publishing.
I had been invited to have lunch with my editor at Oxford University Press. We were just leaving the building for a restaurant when Ron, my editor, was hailed by another editor (whose name I never caught) but who was clearly enormously excited about something.
‘Look at this, Ron!’ the Other Editor said, taking a sheaf of paper out of a large brown envelope. ‘It’s just arrived from America.'
‘What is it?’ asked Ron. ‘A set of proofs?’
The Other Editor shook his head. ‘It’s a manuscript,’ he said.
‘But it’s practically perfect!’ exclaimed Ron in amazement. ‘You could publish it as it stands.’
‘I know,’ said the Other Editor. Speaking almost reverently he added, ‘It’s been done on a word processor.’
Ron thumbed through the manuscript in awed silence.
'This is the future,’ the Other Editor assured him. ‘They’ll all be like this soon.’
Ron shook his head in dismay. ‘Then we’ll be out of a job,’ he observed gloomily.
The Other Editor was right. Pretty soon every manuscript they received (including mine) was being produced on a computer. However, Ron’s gloomy prediction that there would be no more need for editors proved untrue. As in the English language, some things (like the subjunctive) change, but others remain the same.
Real editing, as opposed to straightforward copy editing, is about vision, about understanding the audience, about recognising a voice, developing a story, encouraging talent and fitting all this into the overall strategy of the publishing house. I think there are as many people who can do that today as there always have been.
* Of course strictly speaking it's a mood not a tense as I remembered after writing this but I'm afraid I'm not up to explaining the difference
Wednesday, 7 January 2009
Who Needs Pencils?
Over at An Awfully Big Blog Adventure they are waxing lyrical about pencils and the joy of writing in the old fashioned way. Well I disagree. When I was fourteen I cut my little finger so badly trying to sharpen a pencil with a pen knife that I had to have four stitches and there is still a scar to this day.
For me, a computer is the only way to write. I turn mine on at six thirty in the morning and turn it off just before I get into bed. It’s better than having a whole office full of people working for me. When I’m away from it for more than a day or two, I feel deprived, like a child in the playground whose best friend is at home sick.
Whenever I think about the likes of Charles Dickens or Balzac, writing all those weighty tomes with what was no more than a glorified feather, I am filled with admiration - not to mention relief that I was born into a more technologically advanced era.
I remember writing my first novel on a portable typewriter. What a pain that was! There were passages pasted over earlier versions, notes in the margin, mistakes in the pagination. I must have used several pints of correction fluid. When I was finished it looked like a dog’s breakfast. I had to get the whole thing retyped by a professional before I dared submit it to a publisher. If I’d had to do it with a pen or pencil, there might never have been a second book.
With a computer it’s all so much more pleasant. I can move text about at will, find and replace words and phrases, spell-check my work, keep a running word count and regularly update the table of contents. And if I want to do some research, the internet is the most extraordinary fount of information on every subject you could think of. Not always trustworthy of course, but nearly always inspiring. Try getting all that from a pencil.
The computer is the most elegant, sophisticated, and versatile writing tool that civilisation has ever produced, and also the most democratic. So let’s embrace what the modern world has to offer, not spend our time looking over our shoulders, pining for the good old days of graphite and ink, when books had leather jackets and authors had leather patches on their elbows and when writers were men of letters – even the women.
For me, a computer is the only way to write. I turn mine on at six thirty in the morning and turn it off just before I get into bed. It’s better than having a whole office full of people working for me. When I’m away from it for more than a day or two, I feel deprived, like a child in the playground whose best friend is at home sick.
Whenever I think about the likes of Charles Dickens or Balzac, writing all those weighty tomes with what was no more than a glorified feather, I am filled with admiration - not to mention relief that I was born into a more technologically advanced era.
I remember writing my first novel on a portable typewriter. What a pain that was! There were passages pasted over earlier versions, notes in the margin, mistakes in the pagination. I must have used several pints of correction fluid. When I was finished it looked like a dog’s breakfast. I had to get the whole thing retyped by a professional before I dared submit it to a publisher. If I’d had to do it with a pen or pencil, there might never have been a second book.
With a computer it’s all so much more pleasant. I can move text about at will, find and replace words and phrases, spell-check my work, keep a running word count and regularly update the table of contents. And if I want to do some research, the internet is the most extraordinary fount of information on every subject you could think of. Not always trustworthy of course, but nearly always inspiring. Try getting all that from a pencil.
The computer is the most elegant, sophisticated, and versatile writing tool that civilisation has ever produced, and also the most democratic. So let’s embrace what the modern world has to offer, not spend our time looking over our shoulders, pining for the good old days of graphite and ink, when books had leather jackets and authors had leather patches on their elbows and when writers were men of letters – even the women.
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