Odd Type Writers

by Celia Blue Johnson

  Perhaps one of Hemingway’s most important writing maxims was to step away from his desk before his inspiration ran dry. He described his process to Plimpton: “You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again.” When he arrived at his stack of paper the next morning, Hemingway would revise the latest addition to the story. Then, when he came to the point where he’d left off, he knew what was about to happen next. He observed, “As long as you can start, you are all right. The juice will come.”

  In I’ll Always Have Paris, journalist Art Buchwald described another solution Hemingway had for writer’s block. Buchwald recalled that a friend of his, upon meeting Hemingway, asked him what one needed to do to become a writer. According to Buchwald, Hemingway informed the aspiring writer, “First, you have to defrost the refrigerator.”

  Sound Writing

  JOHN STEINBECK

  1902–1968

  I know how I want it to sound and I know how I want it to feel.

  –John Steinbeck, on East of Eden, in a letter to editor Pascal Covici

  John Steinbeck was just a young boy when he had a life-altering revelation. He realized that “high” rhymes with “fly.” The interplay between sound and meaning was marvelous to him. The enthralled four-year-old was destined to become a wordsmith.

  By the time he reached high school, Steinbeck was composing stories, and he was preoccupied with how they sounded out loud. Steinbeck’s neighbor proved to be the perfect test audience. Not only did Lucille Hughes appreciate the art of writing, she was also conveniently located across the street. Hughes was good friends with Steinbeck’s mother, Olive, though it is likely she saw more of the bold teen during his junior and senior years.

  Hughes was not fond of Steinbeck, but he didn’t seem to notice. He would arrive on her doorstep, stride into her home, and read his work aloud. These readings took place even if Hughes was busy with housework, which was usually the case. Though she was exasperated by the frequent interruptions, Hughes always offered an honest critique. She did not hesitate to inform Steinbeck that he needed to simplify his vocabulary. So Steinbeck began, with the help of a reluctant neighbor, to sound out his stories. The spoken word remained central to his writing process throughout his career.

  At twenty-seven, Steinbeck described the physical act of writing as a mere by-product of his desire to tell a story. In a letter to A. Grove Day, a writer he met at Stanford University, Steinbeck declared, “I would continue to write if there were no writing and no print. I put my words down for a matter of memory.” Steinbeck was responding to Day’s claim that writers should deliver a pristine manuscript to the publisher. Though Steinbeck’s debut, Cup of Gold, had only been released five months earlier, he argued with the conviction of a seasoned writer. He observed, “There are millions of people who are good stenographers but there aren’t so many thousands who can make as nice sounds as I can.” The budding author saw himself as a “minstrel” and not a “scrivener.” He preferred to focus on the telling of a story and let someone else clean up the grammar and spelling.

  Steinbeck’s finely tuned ear must have come in handy when he wrote Of Mice and Men. The novella was designed to function as a book and a script. Steinbeck noted, “I wanted to call it at first ‘a play to be read.’” As the scenes unfolded on the page, Steinbeck was also envisioning them on the stage. The end of each chapter signaled the fall of a curtain.

  Of Mice and Men was published in January of 1937. Soon after the release of the book, playwright and director George S. Kaufman informed Steinbeck that he wanted to bring the tale to the stage. Kaufman’s production was a hit. Despite its undisputable success (the play ran for 207 performances on Broadway), Steinbeck considered his “playable novel” a failure. Steinbeck lamented that the book didn’t adapt seamlessly into a script: “The experiment flopped. By that I mean when I came up against a practical man of the theatre like Kaufman I found that I had to do a lot more extensive rewriting of the book itself.” However, it seems that Steinbeck was a tough critic. He had actually almost hit his mark, as the majority of the story and the dialogue were not altered for the production.

  The image of a writer at work usually involves a person hunched over a desk, poring over pages of work. In Steinbeck’s case, there would be a Dictaphone by the stack of paper. In 1942, Steinbeck was commissioned to write a nonfiction book for the air force, and he was under a very tight deadline. So, he informed his friend Toby Street, “I’m dictating a book into the ediphone.” The recording device helped him work faster, and he found that he preferred a machine to the human alternative. He reflected, “I always have a feeling that I am keeping a steno from going home and doing what she wants to. But this machine is a slave and has no rights nor any home.” Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team raced to completion at the rapid clip of four thousand words per day (a rate that even alarmed Steinbeck to a degree).

  Four years later Steinbeck switched on a Dictaphone to draft his novel The Wayward Bus. On a standard workday he would descend into the basement of his home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. In this quiet refuge, he wrote letters and journal entries before proceeding to the manuscript. His goal was to fill three pages on a yellow legal pad.

  Steinbeck preferred to compose his drafts in pencil, for the most part. He kept twelve pencils at his desk, and it was essential that each one had a sharp point. An electric pencil sharpener was one of his most cherished tools. Steinbeck summed up his work regimen: “I sharpen all the pencils in the morning and it takes one more sharpening for a day’s work. That’s twenty-four sharp points. I can make a newly sharpened pencil last almost a page.” With such prolific output, he often developed calluses on his fingers. His thoughtful editor sent him round pencils to alleviate the pain inflicted by hexagonal ones.

  After he had written his draft in longhand, Steinbeck then dictated it into his machine. He’d play it back for review, closing his eyes to get the full effect of the work. After incorporating revisions to the manuscript, Steinbeck recorded a revised version for the stenographer to type. This process of dictation apparently helped speed up Steinbeck’s work once again; he finished the novel two months before his projected deadline.

  Steinbeck’s Dictaphone was a fixture in his study long after he finished The Wayward Bus. During an interview in 1958, he spoke about his writing process (at this point he had completed more than twenty books). He noted that the first draft was written in pencil and the second was recorded on the Dictaphone. Some of Steinbeck’s best revision occurred while listening to the prose. “You can hear the most terrible things you’ve done if you hear it clear back on tape,” he explained. The recordings lifted his words right off the page. Steinbeck had tried reading aloud, but it didn’t offer the necessary distance. “Then,” he noted, “my eyes are involved.”

  When asked who his influences were as a youth, Steinbeck named two authors: Donn Byrne and James Branch Cabell. He added, “These men were specialists in sound—and that’s what I was after.” Steinbeck did precisely what he set out to do: specializing in sound—from reading aloud to his neighbor as a teenager to listening to his voice on tape years later.

  Speak Up

  John Steinbeck wasn’t the only author to talk his way into great literature. Several renowned writers were compelled, for one reason or another, to put down their pens and dictate their work.

  After he lost his sight, John Milton turned to those around him to serve as amanuenses. He dictated his epic poem Paradise Lost to a variety of people, including friends, family members, and students. The poet called upon visitors to record stanzas, whether committed to memory or composed on the spot.

  William Makepeace Thackeray dictated his prose to his eldest daughter, Anne. However, she recalled that when her father “came to a critical point he would send his secretary away and write for himself.”

  When the due date loomed for his nov
el The Gambler, Fyodor Dostoyevsky took on a stenographer to save time. Twenty-year-old Anna Grigorievna Snitkina got the job. Together, they raced to complete the book within one month. The writer and the stenographer proved to be a perfect pair: They met the deadline and fell in love. After they were married, Dostoyevsky continued to dictate novels to his wife.

  In 1897, painful rheumatism drove fifty-three-year-old Henry James to find an alternative to the typewriter. For the rest of his life, he relied on amanuenses to compose letters and novels. Theodora Bosanquet, one of James’s typists, recalled how particular he was about the sound of a typewriter. “He dictated to an Oliver typewriter with evident discomfort, and found it impossibly disconcerting to write to something that made no responsive sound at all,” noted Bosanquet. A Remington, however, produced the perfect clack.

  Pin It Down

  EUDORA WELTY

  1909–2001

  That’s what I really love doing—putting things in their best and proper place, revealing things at the time when they matter most.

  —Eudora Welty, in an interview for the Paris Review

  Eudora Welty evaluated her work with scissors handy. If anything needed to be moved, she cut it right out of the page. Then she’d use pins to put the section in its new place. In a letter to author and editor William Maxwell, Welty listed an assortment of pins that she used for one of her novels. She recalled, “The Ponder Heart was in straight pins, hat pins, corsage pins, and needles, and when I got through typing it out, I had more pins than I started with. (So it’s economical.)” Welty also liked the flexibility of revising with pins. In an interview for the Paris Review, she observed that if glue was used, “you can’t undo it.” Pins made it easy to move a snippet of text again and again.

  Welty would place her altered pages on her bed or the dining room table. When she was done cutting and pinning, she sat down and typed a clean version. The freshly typed pages were then subject to another round of cutting and pinning. And some sections underwent several rounds of revision.

  Welty composed most of her work in Jackson, Mississippi, the town where she grew up. Though she loved to travel, she always returned to her hometown. During her senior year of high school, Welty’s family moved into a charming house on Pinehurst Street in Jackson. As the eldest of six children, Welty had the honor of picking a prime bedroom on the second floor. Welty left Jackson to attend college, first in Mississippi and later in New York. She tried a few times to find a literary job in Manhattan, with no luck. Eventually, in her late twenties, Welty settled back in that same house on Pinehurst Street, where her mother, Chestina, still lived (Welty’s father passed away in 1931).

  Welty’s typical workday began in the morning, while she was still in her nightgown. She would sit at her desk in the second-floor bedroom that she had selected as a teen. Though she faced the wall, she preferred to work in close proximity to the outside view. So, as she wrote, sunlight would filter in from the window to her side. She noted, “I like to be aware of the world going on while I’m working.” Welty’s first drafts were written directly on a typewriter. “I guess my journalistic training taught me to want to see something on the page, objective, in type,” she observed. After college, she had briefly worked as a journalist.

  Before she placed her fingers on the typewriter keys to compose a story, Welty compiled all sorts of notes in a stenographer pad. In fact, when Chestina was in a convalescent home sixty miles away, Welty would make the long drive with a pad by her side. As soon as an idea struck, she’d scribble it down without pulling over. Her friends were understandably concerned about the unsafe habit. Still, she always made it home safely with the new ideas that were recorded en route. It seems, wherever she was, Welty was compelled to write down ideas as soon as they arrived. And yet, once those notes were distilled into prose, they were subject to the slow, fine art of revision with pins that she developed over the years.

  When an interviewer asked Welty to describe the origin of her “pins-and-scissors method,” she offered two explanations, one related to sewing and the other to journalism. First, she said, “Did you ever cut and make dresses from patterns? Well, I guess it’s that that made me think of it.” Though she was never a proficient seamstress, Welty had witnessed the practice of sewing firsthand. Chestina would cut fabric for her children’s dresses and outfits. Then a woman named Fannie would visit the Welty’s home and assemble the attire on-site.

  Welty also traced her method back to her short-lived career in journalism. In that fast-paced environment, journalists used long scrolls of paper to type their work. Welty had learned to tear any prose that wasn’t working right off the typewriter. Then she’d adjust the torn page and continue writing. She added, “Except I was too prudent, I guess, to really throw it away. I would save it in case I might need it after all. So I had these strips.”

  Welty became aware of the importance of revision while reading her work aloud to an audience. As she stood before a crowd and spoke, she often noticed areas in her stories that needed improvement. While discussing her readings at colleges, Welty recalled, “I could see all these weaknesses that had been in there all these years and I didn’t know it.” These weaknesses frequently involved a simple shift, moving a piece of a story from one place to another. Welty repeatedly found that something in the beginning of a story fit much better at the end. She remarked, “It’s possible I have a reverse mind, and do things backwards, being a broken left-hander.”

  Each change, no matter how minute, seemed to impact Welty with the same immediate urgency as the original ideas that she jotted in her stenographer pads. Welty observed, “It’s strange how in revision you find some little unconsidered thing which is so essential that you not only keep it in but give it preeminence when you revise.” Sometimes, late at night, while she lay in bed, Welty would realize a particular change that needed to be made. When this nocturnal revelation occurred, she’d make a quick note to remind her of what to address the next day.

  Night and day, Welty’s thoughts wandered to her fiction. And, though she was never skilled at sewing her clothes, Welty was, in her own literary way, a master seamstress. She was constantly snipping, pinning, and adjusting her text, striving to find the best fit for a word, sentence, or paragraph within the framework of a story.

  Point of View

  Eudora Welty wasn’t the only writer who preferred to face away from a window. Ernest Hemingway’s work space in Havana, Cuba, was on the top shelf of a bookcase in his bedroom. He would stand facing the wall, first writing in pencil before moving to his typewriter (see page 132).

  Flannery O’Connor placed her desk against the back of an armoire to maintain her focus. The view of plain wood was far less distracting than the country landscape outside her bedroom window (see page 160).

  When John Steinbeck lived on East 78th Street in Manhattan, he used his basement as a writer’s studio. The author was happy to avoid the distraction of the bustling city. He maintained, “No window, no ability to look out and watch the postman and the garbage wagon.”

  Maya Angelou uses more extreme methods to avoid distraction. No matter where she is residing, Angelou finds a local hotel and rents out a room to write in. She asks that everything be removed from the walls to help her focus completely on writing. In an interview with Angelou for the Paris Review, George Plimpton listed the select items that the author kept in her otherwise spartan work environment: “a bottle of sherry, a dictionary, Roget’s Thesaurus, yellow pads, an ashtray, and a Bible.”

  In terms of intense focus, few spaces come close to the one where Dame Edith Sitwell lay every morning. Diane Ackerman reported that Sitwell found inspiration in extraordinarily tight quarters. Before she set pen to paper, the poet would lie in an open coffin. There, in that windowless setting, she prepared for her day’s work.

  When he turned fifty, George Bernard Shaw moved to a small town called Ayot St. Lawrence, where he worked in a tiny shed in his backyard. He faced a wooden wall, but there we
re windows on either side. Shaw rigged his shed so that it would rotate. That way, rather than lamenting the way the light fell into his room, he could adjust his position whenever he liked.

  On the other end of the spectrum, in terms of a view, was Mark Twain. His sister-in-law had an idyllic writing room built for him on a hilltop on Quarry Hill, her farm in Elmira, New York. Twain and his family spent summers at the farm. The isolated writing quarters suited Twain perfectly. Every day, he strolled out to his special hut, which was located far away from the general hubbub on the farm. Twain described the space: “It is octagonal, with a peaked roof, each face filled with a spacious window, and it sits perched in complete isolation on the top of an elevation that commands leagues of valley and city and retreating ranges of distant blue hills. It is a cozy nest.” As he wrote, Twain could look up in any direction and take in the beautiful panorama, before setting back to work.

  Don’t Get Up

  TRUMAN CAPOTE

  1924–1984

  I can’t think unless I’m lying down.

  —Truman Capote in an interview for the Paris Review

  Truman Capote was in his creative element when fully reclined. He stated, “I’m a completely horizontal author.” Capote’s workday began in the same place where one typically ends—lying in bed or on a couch. He’d rest a notebook against his knees and write. A cup of coffee and a cigarette were always positioned within reach. “I’ve got to be puffing and sipping,” he observed. Over the course of the day, Capote’s position remained the same, but his beverages changed. After coffee, he transitioned to mint tea, followed by sherry. By the end of the day, he’d have a martini in hand.