Imagine Writing A Novel On A Typewriter!

Back in the day when there were no home computers, I wrote my first two published novels on a big old Remington manual typewriter. Today, addicted to my computer, it is hard to figure out how the hell I did that. For those of you too young to have experienced composing a book on a manual typewriter, or for those who did, let me explain what my own ordeal was like.

First, I had to make sure to have an endless supply of white paper, a bottle or two of “White Out” and a very deep waste basket. I’d insert a piece of paper and start clanging away. Make a typo, no problem, white it out. Want to change a sentence or paragraph, big problem. If the offending paragraph was in the middle of the page, you had to pull the whole page out and discard, then retype perfectly fine copy before and after the bad graph. After a couple hours of this, if you had pulled more paper than you care to remember, you became angry and resentful of the typewriter. Now when you had to remove a sheet, you ripped it out hard, crumpled it tight in your fist and then hurled it like a 95 mph fastball at the waste can. My basket was always four or five feet away. I guess psychologically I felt if it was closer to me, that would mean I was going to make a lot of mistakes that needed discarding. Earlier in the day’s work, I would pretend to be making basketball shots. Later, I threw nothing but high hard ones.

There were times at the end of the writing day when I wanted to pick the typewriter up and hurl it out the window, but my Remington weighed about thirty-five pounds and I would have gotten a hernia trying to heave it, never mind if it fell two stories and hit someone on the head. Murder by typewriter would get you the death penalty. So I settled for merely glaring at the typewriter for several seconds to let the damn machine know I was pissed at it, then put its tarp cover over and walked away. That sure beat facing the truth that you’d written miserably that day.

The only pleasure I got out of that old Remington was pounding the keys. You really had to hit them hard to make them print. For an emotional, rhythmic writer like me, it perfectly suited my mindset. I felt like I was working out in the gym doing an aerobic exercise, my arms and upper body in sync. The banging sound of keys hitting paper and spitting out new words was music to my ears. The faster you went, the more noise you made, and I always felt like the typewriter was saying to me: YOU GOT IT! YOU’RE ROLLING, BABY! Conversely, if there wasn’t much sound coming out of the room you were working in, anybody living with you understood that it was shaping up as a bad mood day. My wife at the time knew to stay away from me after one of those quiet days, at least for the time it took me to suck down a Wild Turkey on the rocks. Then I mellowed. Well, as mellow as a firebrand like me could have been in those days.

Many old newspaper reporters, like the great Jimmy Breslin, will say they missed the maniacal sounds in the newsroom back then, the multitude of typewriters clanging away in a symphony of discordant sound…the thick cigar and cigarette smoke that hung like a poisonous cloud overhead…and reporters yelling out “COPY,” the lingo for asking a copy boy to come over.

When home computers first started coming out, I found it impossible to compose a novel on them. Looking at the screen seemed too foreign to me. So I would write on the old machine, and at the end of the day, take what I had done and type it into the computer. Ludicrous today, but made sense back then…and was a royal pain in the ass!

My experience as a newspaper reporter was somewhat different, and just as annoying. I was a sportswriter for 19 years, and traveled all over the country with Knicks, and later the Yanks and Mets. The computers we took on the road were office-issued and designed to transmit your copy back to the newspaper’s computer. The first one I got was the size of a medium suitcase, and had to weigh forty pounds. It “saved” copy on a video cassette you inserted. To send your copy, the machine came with “cups” on top where you could insert your telephone and give the computer commands to transmit.

Some of the arenas, particularly the ancient one in Chicago, were extraordinarily loud places and gave the computer fits. Bulls fans were easily the noisiest in the NBA. If the yelling got loud enough, it would send a false signal through the cups to “transmit,” so I had to put my sports jacket over it at those times.

Before those ancient computers, the way reporters on the road got copy to the office was by handing your story to a man with a fax machine. There was one present at all ballgames. The operator would insert your page into a cylinder which spun round and round transmitting it to your newsroom AP wire service machine. It took three minutes to transmit one page. Sometimes it didn’t work and had to be resent. So after you wrote your first page, you’d rush it to the fax guy, then go back working on a second page.

If there were three or four New York sportswriters in the press room or press box with me, we would be in competition to get to that damn machine first or else have to wait three minutes or more – while on deadline! Tempers flared between us, fist fights seemed like they would break out at any moment. There was even one Daily News sportswriter, whom I constantly scooped and had much better insight into games than he did, who would sneak back to the fax machine and look at pages of mine that had already been sent and were lying on the desk of the fax guy. Often he copied my ideas. This came to an abrupt end when I…well I won’t go there.

Flash forward to the present. I have now written four novels in my mystery series on the computer and cannot even remotely imagine how I would have done them on a typewriter, with the constant revising each day, and then the journey through the later drafts, sometimes as many as twenty or more. While writing, I am constantly changing sentences and graphs, and each new work day I go back and read and edit what I wrote the day before.

I am also an internet addict. Writing scenes about places I have never seen would be impossible without my beloved Google searches. Since I am not a cross dresser, describing a woman’s designer dress, shoes, blouse and evening gowns, I would be lost. Online, not only do I get descriptions of women’s clothes, but Google “images” put the clothes right before my eyes. Ditto for hundreds of other details, such as how many bullets are in the clip of a powerful Desert Eagle handgun; the sound a bullet makes coming out of a gun with a silencer; what a 911 officer actually says on the phone to someone calling in an emergency; the layout of the Plaza Hotel lobby, and so on.

Back in the day, if you wanted to know what the Plaza lobby looked like, you had to haul your ass over and visit it. The only alternative was to make up a fictitious hotel. Living in upstate New York, and having a mystery series that takes place in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights section, I would have to move there were it not for Google. Instead, I  keep a “Brooklyn file,” updated daily with news from the borough, always looking for unique places, festivals, anything that could be used in one of my novels.

In my third book of the series, I have a character who is a high class call girl who works for an elite escort service similar to the one that brought former NY governor Elliot Spitz crashing down. Online, I was able to find out how much these gals make, how the money is split with management, the procedure involved in getting one sent out to you etc. In researching these elite services, I came across a gem of tangential material, which I immediately worked into my book: in Japan, there are “professional seducers,” who work for large investigative firms. When a wife suspects hubby is cheating on her, she goes to one of these firms. Rather than waste time and money having their ops trail the cheater around and wait until he commits adultery, they speed up the process by using professional seducers. These beautiful women “accidentally” meet the spouse, share a drink and begin a courtship that eventually lands them in the sack, where a camera hidden inside a pack of cigarettes and placed by the love bed picks up every detail. It is not prostitution, and perfectly legal, because the seducer gets paid a weekly salary by the firm, pays her taxes and never asks her target for money.

Thinking back to the old masters like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe and many, many others, it is hard to understand how they typed such marvelously-worded manifestos, especially Wolfe. He would routinely turn in a “finished” novel to his Scribner’s editor, the great Maxwell Perkins, which was rarely less than 1,000 pages, usually much longer. Maxwell had to edit and cut out scores of pages, a herculean job.

All of that is a world gone by, never to be seen again.

Thank God!

Guest Blogger Robert Jones

Robert Jones is an aspiring novelist and freelance writer who currently resides in Las Vegas, NV.  He has worked for many of the top poker and boxing websites, including most recently Pokerworks.com and Pound4Pound.com.  Recently Robert has put many of his freelance writing assignments behind in hopes of succeeding at his real dream, becoming a novelist.

Fear and Trembling in the Writing World

When Nat asked me to do a guest spot on his blog I was both honored and terrified.  I was honored because Nat has been one of the biggest influences on my writing career over the last six years or so.  I was terrified because I wasn’t sure what to write about. But the more Nat gave me ideas, the more I became comfortable.  Nat thought it would be a good concept to let his readers see one writer (Nat) in the prime of his writing career, dealing with the issues that go along with preparing to get published, and someone just starting their quest down the novel writing road (me).  I couldn’t have agreed more.

While I’m a complete novice when it comes to novel writing, I am not a complete novice when it comes to writing in general.  I first became aware that I was interested in writing in high school when I started reading any book I could get my hands on.  From kindergarten to my sophomore year in high school, it was an accomplishment if I read one book a year.  That all changed in my junior year when I read a Muhammad Ali biography for a history class.  I had always had an interest in boxing, so reading that book led me to all the biographies and autobiographies on boxers I could find, many of which are still on my shelf today.  I began to frequent boxing message boards. I found that I enjoyed writing about the fighters I had learned about, and being engrossed in the arguments you find on those boards about the “greatest fighters ever,” and “is Mike Tyson really insane?” 

One week after graduating high school I was rewarded with the best graduation gift I could ask for – back surgery.  The surgery forced me to be bed ridden for the better part of the summer, so once again I started to read, but this time instead of reading boxing books I read many of the ones I was assigned to in high school, books I had opted to pass on at the time.  All summer I read as many of the classics I could get my hands on, my favorites being “The Catcher in the Rye,” “Animal Farm,” and “Lord of the Flies.” 

Around the time I could walk without assistance I started classes at a community college.  I really had no desire to go to college, but an ultimatum was put to me by my parents (one they regret since, but we all make mistakes) so I tried to find a few classes I was interested in.  I passed exactly one course that semester—Philosophy--but that class, particularly one assignment, changed my life forever.

For the final exam we were given the assignment to write “The Philosophy on ___________” with the blank being anything you wanted.  Sitting there the night before the assignment was due, I chose a natural subject for me, procrastination.  I wrote how procrastination wasn’t always a bad thing. Then I brashly wrote, “despite me not starting this paper until a few hours until it’s due, I will still pass, and I will still get a good grade.”  I wasn’t saying this in a cocky way, and I’m far from conceited, but I truly believed that my idea for the topic, and the way I was writing it was unique.  Luckily, I turned out to be right.  On the day the teacher was to hand back the assignments, now graded, he paused and said, “In my 20 plus years of being a teacher I have never even considered reading a student’s paper aloud. However, there was one this year I was going to, he’ll know who it was when he gets his paper back.”  I still had no idea it was my paper he was talking about, but when I got it back he had written numerous praises and “LOL’s” on it.  Still, he gave me a “B” because my references weren’t done correctly.  So despite failing every class that year, I had discovered that I may have some kind of future with writing. 

Over the next few years I didn’t really like school any better, but I did find classes I genuinely enjoyed, including English and creative writing.  During this time, I also started writing for a few boxing websites. There was no pay, but it was still thrilling to see my stories published on a website.  Then something terrible happened, I began to get paid for my work.  That may sound odd, but when I started getting paid, first for a boxing website, and later for a poker website, it was thrilling.  The downside was that after a while you couldn’t tell anymore if you were writing “for the love of the game,” or because you needed to get paid.

Ironically, it was at a website for which I was getting paid that I met Nat.  At first our conversations revolved around my work, but over time the emails got more personal.  It was here that Nat told me I have a real penchant for writing, and more importantly the right mind mindset to be interesting.  Even back then, Nat wished I would put aside some of the boxing and poker freelance jobs and do some writing for myself.  I dabbled here and there, but I never seriously put the time into any of the personal ideas I had mostly because I was busy with other things. 

Fast forward eight years and here we are.  A few months ago, after seven years of making a living as a freelance writer, I began to suffer burnout.  I dreaded writing another poker story, and some of the characters in the boxing world were wearing thin on my nerves.  Over those last few months most of my writing has come in the form of Facebook status updates, and writing a list of things I need when I go grocery shopping.  In the meantime I have recharged my batteries by playing a lot of poker (i.e. social interaction), and once again reading books, something I have put off over the last few years.

Not to be overlooked is my wife, Jessica, who has put up with what I’m sure looks like laziness in her husband over the last few months.  If she’s had an issue with it, she hasn’t told me.  In a recent e-mail to Nat I compared my wife to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Zelda.  Zelda put up with a lot from her husband while waiting for him to not only find his muse, but also do something about it.  Jessica has been a saint when it comes to dealing with my issues over having a writing career, and that’s truly been an inspiration to me. 

So now I am ready for the next phase.  If I told you it was without reservations, it would be a lie.  Nat’s writing style is intimidating to me, mostly because of the amount of work he puts in improving his writing via the process of editing.  Nat often reminds me of one of my favorite Hemingway quotes.  When asked why he edited “The Old Man and the Sea” 95 times he responded, “because I didn’t have time to edit it 96 times.”  That process worked for him, as that book won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1952.  The endless editing is the one thing most daunting to me when it comes to writing.  However, Nat has a simple response to that.  “Just write.”

As I haven’t accomplished anything as of yet in the world of novel writing, I can’t leave you with any great keys to success. All I can do is to wish you success in the path you choose to take down your own personal writing road.  I will warn you, though, the path you think you’re choosing, and the path you actually go down will not be the same.  As John Lennon said, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.”