But I'd signed a contract, and I'd taken an advance which I could not afford to repay, and for all I knew my fear was coloring my view of things. Perhaps I could indeed write the book. I lowered my head and charged forward, five pages a day, come hell or high water, and although I kept having one bad patch after the other, I got the thing done.
And it was not good. Let there be no mistake about it; my effort was as bad in the whole as it had looked in part. But it was done. And that, in and of itself, was better than if I'd left it unfinished.
There's even a happy ending. I was able to enlist a collaborator, adventure novelist Harold King, and turned the book over to him. Our joint effort, Code of Arms, was published by Richard Marek and is doing very nicely, thank you. The triumph I feel on its behalf is of an odd sort. There's been nothing equivocal, though, in my having seen that first draft through to completion. If I hadn't been willing to Do It Anyway, to get the thing written no matter how much I hated writing it, there would have been no book and I would have learned none of the lessons the experience provided. And that, I submit, is in itself the most important of those lessons.
CHAPTER 18
F U CN RD THS
YOU'VE PROBABLY seen the ads on buses and subways. f u cn rd ths, they proclaim, u cn gt a gd jb & mo pa. The message is as attractive as it is succinct. Who, given his druthers, wouldn't prefer a gd jb? Who, in the face of double-digit inflation, couldn't make use of mo pa?
What they're selling, of course, is instruction in Speedwriting, an alternative to shorthand employing ordinary letters and taking the form of verbal arcana of the sort quoted above. The implication is that if you can read that sort of thing you can in due course learn to write that sort of thing and to do so at such a pace as will enable you to take dictation, with ensuing improvement in your employment, your salary, and, one assumes, your posture and your love life.
Did you have a question, Rachel?
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I was just wondering what all this had to do with writing, sir.
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We'll get to that, Rachel.
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Because if you're seriously suggesting that we'll be better writers by leaving out vowels and stuff?
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Don't get your vowels in an uproar, Rachel. What I'm getting at is the whole question of increasing one's writing speed. The faster we produce our books and stories, it would stand to reason, the more books and stories we'll be able to write over the months and years. Similarly, if we can halve the number of hours it takes us to turn out a particular piece of work, we shall be doubling our hourly rate of compensation in the process.
There are a couple of implicit assumptions here, chief among them the notion that an increase in writing speed will not be accompanied by a drop-off in writing quality. And it's quite natural to believe that the opposite is true, that the faster one writes something the more slipshod and imperfectly conceived and developed it is likely to be. Don't you get out of something what you put into it?
I think the question's an interesting one. Joseph Heller's second novel, Something Happened, was some ten years in the writing; would it have been a poorer piece of work had it been accomplished in five? At the other extreme, Voltaire is supposed to have written Candide in three days. Would he have made a better job of it by allowing a full week for its composition?
It's certainly possible to contend that an increase in writing speed can adversely affect the quality of one's work. One might rush through the work before ideas have had a chance to develop. But it is also possible to argue that sometimes a book or story will be better for having been written more rapidly.
I think there's a definite gain in intensity, for one thing. If I write a book in a month, for instance, it's likely to be all of a piece. The way I feel about my characters?and, consequently, the way they feel about things?is likely to remain the same from start to finish. Furthermore, if I write that book in a month it's going to be very much a presence in my mind throughout that month. If the same amount of writing is spread out over a year, it will probably claim a correspondingly smaller portion of each day's conscious and unconscious attention.
Similarly, fast writing helps keep a book from going stale. If a book seems to be taking forever in the writing, I'm likely to be bored by the process of writing it. While it is not necessarily axiomatic that a book which bores its writer will have the same effect on its reader, it's rare that a writer's disenchantment with his work doesn't show up on the printed page one way or another.
This is not to say that the faster a book is written the better it will be. For one thing, there is a trade-off. A gain in intensity may be offset by a loss of that quality that comes of living in and with a book for an extended period of time. If I rush too rapidly through what I'm writing, I don't give myself time to explore its possibilities, time to learn more about its characters. And I find myself in the position of an aggressive general who has outrun his supply lines; by covering literary ground at too swift a pace, I'm unable to replenish the energy required to allow each day's work to be of optimum quality.
How fast is too fast? This is a hard question to answer, because the answer seems to vary not only from one writer to the next but from one book to another.
The fastest book I ever wrote took three writing days. My second daughter had just been born and I thought it would be nice to be able to settle the hospital bill. I accordingly arranged to write an extra book that month for my regular publisher, a soft-core sex novel of the sort I was then doing monthly at a usual pace of ten working days over two weeks. I wrote from nine in the morning until six or seven at night for two days, then worked from nine to three on the third day, and completed a two-hundred-five-page manuscript by that happy hour.
I don't know that the book was any better or any worse than what I generally turned out in those days. I do know that I forgot each scene as I wrote it, that my words seemed to pass onto the page and out of my mind simultaneously, to the point where I could never recall from one page to the next what color hair my characters had, or anything much beyond their names. The names, too, were forgotten within a day of finishing the book, and I now recall nothing whatever about it except the speed of its production. I don't own a copy, and it's not improbable that I could read the thing now without recognizing it.
That book, I would say without hesitation, was written too rapidly.
On the other hand, I wrote a book called Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man in four consecutive days, and while nobody ever mistook it for Candide, I think it worked out rather well. The ideas kept coming as fast as I could type and I simply couldn't tear myself away from the book. Another book, Such Men Are Dangerous, took eight or nine days and was similarly written in white heat; a lot of people consider it my strongest novel.
I can't write at that pace any more, not merely because I'm older but because my writing has become more deliberate. Really fast writing demands that one wear blinders like a racehorse; thus attired, one plunges, single-mindedly toward the goal, undistracted by alternative possibilities. There was a time when I rarely envisioned more than one way to write a sentence, or construct a scene, or fabricate a plot. Now, considerably more aware of my options, I need the time to select among them.
And yet the latest Bernie Rhodenbarr mystery, The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza, took a mere month to spring from my typewriter, much to my own surprise. And its admittedly biased author thinks it's the best of the series.
Go figure.
There are, it has been said, two kinds of people in the world?those who divide people into two categories and those who don't. Ahem. There are, I have come to believe, two kinds of writers in the world, fast writers and slow writers, and transmutation of metals is a cinch compared to turning either into the other.
Still, we often make the attempt. If we hadn't been dissatisfied with ourselves to one degree or another we very likely would not have become writers in the first place, so is it surprising that we're often dissatisfied w
ith the kind of writer we seem to be?
Most commonly, a naturally slow and contemplative writer will try to soup up his engine out of a natural desire to get more accomplished, or to get the same amount accomplished but have the summer free, or whatever. Now and then, however, a fast writer decides to slow down.
Evan Hunter, a born speedwriter, is supposed to have made such a decision some years ago. He'd become acquainted with Stanley Ellin, whose work he understandably admired, learned that Ellin worked at a very slow and painstaking pace, and concluded that his own trouble lay in writing too fast. He resolved to change, and at their next meeting told Ellin with some jubilation, It's working! I'm down to eight pages a day! Ellin at that time thought eight pages was a healthy output for a week, so the idea of holding oneself down to that many pages a day didn't strike him as?yes, Arnold?
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Sir, is this all some elaborate build-up for the old to-thine-own-self-be-true number?
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You do provide one with the makings of a humility attack, Arnold. I suppose part of today's lesson is indeed the suggestion that you seek to be the sort of writer you truly are, which may not be that far from what Polonius was saying. But I have a few more specific thoughts as well.
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I was hoping you would, sir.
1. DON'T ASSUME TOO MUCH. Most professional writers tend to aim for a daily production quota, one or two or five or ten pages of copy a day. This quota system seems to be generally useful?I know I've always found it so?but I think it's a mistake to assume that a particular magic number will remain a constant through all the books or stories one writes or through all one's states of mind.
In long-distance running, one is advised to pace onself at the edge of one's breathing?i.e., run so that running faster would leave one short of breath. I think a writer can find his maximum safe speed in much the same fashion.
2. QUIT WHEN YOU GET TIRED. The work I do after a certain point is work that might better be left undone. When I'm tired, I'm just not at my best; if I continue to stay at the typewriter I'm either wasting my time or doing something distinctly counter-productive. Again, avoid assuming you're tired because you're always tired after X number of pages. Instead, concentrate on developing an awareness of how you actually feel.
3. AVOID CHEMICAL ASSISTANCE. There are cunning little pills available which banish fatigue, stimulate the central nervous system, and seem to sharpen creativity while extending performance. Sooner or later these magic pills rot your kidneys, calcify your liver, leach the calcium out of your bones and teeth, and lead in the fullness of time to dependency, madness, degeneration of the nervous system, and death.
There are writers who take them anyway, at their peril. I did so, at one point, and I do not do so any longer. I found that the psychic damage alone was too high a price to pay for whatever service the drugs seemed to provide.
The story is told of the college student who took a hit of speed and proceeded to write the most brilliant exam paper in the history of the department. Unfortunately, he wrote it all on one line.
Yes, Arnold?
You wouldn't happen to remember where he bought the stuff, would you, sir?
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Speed kills, Arnold.
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Oh, I know that, sir. But couldn't I take it until I need glasses? Just a joke, sir. Just my little joke.
CHAPTER 19
Washing Garbage
THERE ARE writers who enjoy rewriting. At least they say they do, and a feigned passion for revision would seem as unlikely as a pretended carnal enthusiasm for chickens, so I'm perfectly willing to believe them. These people say things like, My books aren't written; they're rewritten. Or, Once I get a first draft hammered out, then the real fun begins?the second draft. Then comes the third draft, and the fourth draft, and finally the joys of the final polish. Of course sometimes it's not really final because I just can't resist running the manuscript through the typewriter again.
Well, de gustibus non disputandum est, as the old lady said when she kissed the cow. For my part, I can't imagine too many things more resistible than running a manuscript through a typewriter for the fifth or sixth time. I'd sooner run a camel through the eye of a needle. Or vice versa, come to think of it.
Other writers regard revision as a chore, and an unpleasant chore at that, but they seem to accept it as an inescapable part of the game. In the first draft, one is given to understand, the writer simply tries to get it down on paper. The second draft realigns the plot, smooths out inconsistencies of character, and otherwise gets the writer's ducks in a row. In the third draft scenes are restructured, plot and character refined. In the fourth, paragraphs and sentences are hammered into shape, dialogue is sharpened, commas are dropped here and inserted there. And, sooner or later, the abominable first draft emerges transformed into something divine and imperishable.
The late Jacqueline Susann frequently told television audiences how she rewrote every book four or five times, using yellow paper for one draft, green for another, pink for a third, blue for a fourth, and finally producing finished copy on white bond. I don't seem to recall what the point of this rainbow approach to revision may have been, nor am I sure I believe Susann actually did this; anyone as good as she at self-promotion might well have been capable of embroidery.
But that hardly matters. What's relevant, I think, is that Susann knew her audience. The public evidently likes the idea of reading books over which writers have labored endlessly. Perhaps it's somehow galling to shell out upwards of eight ninety-five for a book that flowed from its author's typewriter like water from a cleft rock. The stuff's supposed to read as though it came naturally and effortlessly, but one wants to be assured that a soul-satisfying amount of hard work went into it.
Well, the public be damned. The same public goes to prizefights to see boxers flattened and attends auto races hoping desperately to witness a crash. If they want hard work from writers, well, we can tell them we sweated our tails off. But do we actually have to rewrite our books and stories over and over?
There is, let it be said, a persuasive argument against rewriting. It can be advanced in either of two ways, depending whether one's approach is that of the artiste or the cynic.
The former might hold that a piece of creative work should indeed be all of a piece, that its artistic integrity is in part a function of the artist's mood at the moment of creation, that the verve and passion involved in writing could only be diluted by rewriting. Jack Kerouac took a position along these lines, explaining that he was trying to create a spontaneous bop prosody that amounted to a novelist's equivalent of a jazz musician's creative improvisation. This approach seems to have worked for Kerouac better in some books than in others?I found it generally effective in The Subterraneans, less so elsewhere?and I'm willing to entertain the hypothesis that the man's novels would have been watered down rather than spruced up by another trip or two through their author's typewriter.
A cynical rendition of the same argument may be found in a novel about a hack science-fiction writer who is enormously contemptuous of his own work and of the people who read it. He never rewrites anything, we are informed, because he knows revision would rob his crap of the only thing it has going for it, its freshness. Once you start rewriting, he argues, you're not able to stop. With each draft the fundamental banality and worthlessness of the material becomes more evident even as its vitality and spontaneity are drained from it. All you wind up doing is what William Goldman, discussing in The Season the agony of restructuring and rewriting an inadequate play prior to its opening, called washing garbage.
Personally, I've always detested rewriting. When once I get to the end of a piece of work, whether it's a quickie short-short or a ten-pound novel, I bloody well feel finished. When I write The End, I mean it.
Years ago I hardly ever did any rewriting. I was churning out appalling quantities of pulp novels and my first drafts were publishable as they stood. I had enough natural facility s
o that my prose and dialogue got by. Plot and characterization barely existed in these books, so revision wasn't necessary to rectify inconsistencies in those departments.
My attitude at the time was a cavalier one. I never rewrite, I was apt to say, because I make it a point to get it right the first time around. It does seem easier that way.
Ah, the brashness of youth. I'm older now, and a shade less arrogant, and the books and stories I write come less like the torrents of spring and more like molasses in January. They are more ambitious and they take a good deal more of my time.
And they involve considerably more rewriting than they used to.
But I still don't enjoy the process. And I still try to get it right the first time around. Because, all things considered, it still seems easier that way.
Unless you're one of those souls who was born to rewrite, you'd probably prefer to spend less time redoing your work and more time writing new things?or working in the garden, or watching sunsets, or whatever. Toward that end, let me offer a hint or two.
1. DON'T TAKE REWRITING FOR GRANTED. It may very well be that everything you ever publish will make two or more trips through your typewriter on its way to immortality. That's okay. What's not okay is writing your first draft with the assumption that that's all it is, a first draft, a piece of unfinished work, and thus an excuse for you to be utterly sloppy about what you're doing. It doesn't matter how rough it is, I just want to get this down; later on I can worry about turning it into English. Well, no. Sorry, but I don't buy it. All a sloppy first draft teaches you is to be sloppy in your writing.
What's useful in this regard is a sort of doublethink process. You know you're going to have to rewrite the piece, but in the course of your first draft you act as if the version you're doing will be final copy, ready for the printer. This way you'll produce a cleaner, more artfully crafted first draft?and, every once in a while, you'll find that it can stand as written, that you honestly don't have to rewrite it. And even when you do, it's a whole lot easier to remodel than something that reads as though you typed it with your toes.
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