I'm curious about books about writers in the typewriter age

[FrankZubek]

I am curious about the days when writers did their magic on typewriters.

Back in the day when you couldn't fix a chapter or two by simply copy/pasting the offending portion of the work.

Back when a rewrite or fixing the manuscript meant totally re typing the book (or possibly just an offending chapter or two).
Either way- I suspect that since writers got paid less back then (despite the cheaper cost of living ) it was paramount to try to do no more than a few drafts of a book since rewrites literally meant time taken away from any new work they might want to be working on

So I suspect that the better you were , back then, the more material you could produce. And yes, I know the same holds true today but back then a rewrite meant going back in there and totally retyping pages and pages of work instead a few taps of a keyboard the way we do now.

So does anyone know of biographical books that get into the process they went through in the past?
Do you have a favorite book like this (autobiography of an author or two that gets into the hassles or joys of this older process?)

I am also aware that these type of books may not be on Kindle but I am willing to get a few in paper format since Amazon has a good used book section

[BowlOfCherries]

You might check out "Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters".  It contains the daily letters that John Steinbeck wrote to his friend/editor while working on what Steinbeck considered to be his best novel, "East of Eden".   Through the letters, you get a sense of his writing process (both creative and mechanical).  It was a fascinating read.

[Jan Strnad]

It was a pain in the *ss.

Re-writing meant keeping scissors, transparent tape, and a felt marker on hand at all times. When I wanted to edit, my wife had always stolen the scissors, my kid had stolen the marker (I'd find it in his room, with the cap off, dried up), and God only knows what happened to the tape.

The worst was typing the final, "clean" manuscript and making the carbon copy with carbon paper...maybe a couple of copies. Every single typo meant stopping, cranking the page up, putting Liquid Paper on the original and the copy and the next copy, blowing on it until it dried, then cranking the paper back down and retyping. Just TRY to keep any momentum up under that system!

I wrote one novel under this system. It's buried in the garage. If I had an electronic copy, I might rewrite it into something decent. As it is, I'd have to OCR the d*mn thing first or retype by hand.

I did a number of comic book scripts this way, and it was painful! I couldn't enter the electronic age soon enough!

[jumbojohnny]

I was that bad at this I'm not sure I even qualify to answer this post. I began trying to commit my early short stories to a more formal format, ie, using a typewriter to transfer the tatty manuscripts in pen, and sometimes even pencil, to typed out sheets. I did manage one, but it was so painfully slow it took me days and days to transfer it. I had planned to use it from scratch too, use it for my thoughts, musings, early drafts etc, and build it up into the finished MS all on the tyepwriter, but I knew if I was taking that long to transfer what was already in some form, rough though it was, then it was not a good idea to sit there frowning, then put my initial thoughts and ideas down by typing them. So, gave up, went back to good ole bic and Woolies A4 pads and it stayed that way until the early word processors came in.

[Tony Rabig]

I'll echo Jan's comment -- it was a pain.  Every typo a nightmare of correction fluid and re-positioning of the page on the roller.  Even worse were the typos you didn't catch while the page was still in the machine...

I can't recall in which of Lawrence Block's books on writing (if memory serves) I saw this: he was preparing a final draft of a novel and realized when it was almost finished that he'd accidentally omitted a couple of key paragraphs in typing an earlier chapter.  Rather than do all that retyping, he wrote a fresh page to insert, starting where the previous page left off mid-sentence, and ending mid-sentence so that it would fit perfectly into the following page, and numbering it something like page 47a.

[FrankZubek]

Bowlofcherries- thanks I'll check that out!

Also thanks to Tony, Jumbo and Jan as well- if anyone else knows of similar books please add them here!

[Sheila_Guthrie]

Gee, thanks. Now I'll have nightmares! 

I'm pretty sure Stephen King talks about his early days with a typewriter in On Writing, and also Lawrence Block in Writing the Novel. Those are two books I have, and have read recently, that I remember covering the subject.

About 25 years ago, I wrote for a newspaper on a very early manual typewriter that took a tremendous amount of force to move the keys. Ouch! We would just XXXX out typos and short changes, as long as the story was understandable to the typesetter. I was so glad I talked that wonderful lady into teaching me how to use the typesetting machine--it was like an early word processor. So much easier, and you could correct mistakes, and cut and paste whole sections.

In high school I worked for a teacher typing up lesson handouts and test papers, which were typed up on those purple emulsion sheets and run off by hand on a printing machine.

Man, I feel old now.

[daveconifer]

I've re-read parts of King's Misery a gazillion times because I'm fascinated with the typewritten-pages process of writing.  Jan's, Tony's and Jumbo's descriptions above are very interesting as well.

The cynical flip side is that it wasn't so easy to "be a writer" under those circumstances and maybe that's why the field was less crowded   Maybe it's too easy now...

[MrPLD]

"Misery" is something my wife refuses to watch - for fear of being scared from writing or fans     Her choice of a good writer's story with a typewriter would probably be "Funny Farm" with Chevy Chase

[R. M. Reed]

I remember in "Misery" she bought a type of paper that made it possible to erase more easily, but the writer made her go back and buy regular paper, because the correctable stuff smeared. I had discovered that problem with correctable paper myself. I know I took to writing on a computer as soon as possible, even on my Atari computer with a TV for a monitor, that only showed forty characters on each line, about half the width of the printed page.

[R M Rowan]

Lift-away correction ribbon was great - until it ran out - again!  Sooo much money spent on correction ribbon.  To make a typo was akin to injuring myself - and nearly brought tears.  Thank goodness those days are over. 

[MrPLD]

I remember getting my first and only IBM Selectric when I was about 12 ... boy oh boy that thing was great, you could make mistakes with one tenth the effort and at least 3 times as fast Subsequently though, I am now only happy typing with an IBM "M" clicky/buckling-spring keyboard, everything else feels like mush to me, I've tried a lot of different keyboards in the last 25 years... still go back to the IBM

[WilliamEsmont]

Gee, thanks. Now I'll have nightmares! 

I'm pretty sure Stephen King talks about his early days with a typewriter in On Writing, and also Lawrence Block in Writing the Novel. Those are two books I have, and have read recently, that I remember covering the subject.

About 25 years ago, I wrote for a newspaper on a very early manual typewriter that took a tremendous amount of force to move the keys. Ouch! We would just XXXX out typos and short changes, as long as the story was understandable to the typesetter. I was so glad I talked that wonderful lady into teaching me how to use the typesetting machine--it was like an early word processor. So much easier, and you could correct mistakes, and cut and paste whole sections.

In high school I worked for a teacher typing up lesson handouts and test papers, which were typed up on those purple emulsion sheets and run off by hand on a printing machine.

Man, I feel old now.

I used to love the smell of fresh mimeographs when I was in elementary school..

[LisaGraceBooks]

The Artful Edit by Susan Bell has sections on the editing process of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and also on his famous editor Max Perkins.

[Terrence OBrien]

A full mark-up of a masters thesis or Phd dissertation was often delivered to a professional typist. There were lots of services clustered around universities, and many students ran their own businesses.

I recently visited the Truman Museum in Independence, Mo. It was very interesting to look at the typed documents from the era. I suspect the formatting and type quality of many of the documents from the White House would have been extremely jarring, annoying, and irritating to today's more sensitive readers.

[FrankZubek]

Hey Bowlofcherries- I ordered "Steinbeck: A Life in Letters' edited by Elaine Steinbeck & Robert Wallsten which looked more interesting    In fact I already got it in the mail yesterday! Huge book covers many personal letters he wrote to friends and colleagues (all done...on the typewriter)

I suppose I'll wind up getting the one you recommended down the road but thanks to your suggestion I'm enjoying this other book

Thanks for all the comments and I welcome more if you all have any

[jackz4000]

"The Writer's Craft" by John Hersey circa early 70's. You may find it on AMZ, it's a collectors item. About 20 great writers from Agatha Christie on tell of their methods.

[Kevis 'The Berserker' Hendrickson]

The cynical flip side is that it wasn't so easy to "be a writer" under those circumstances and maybe that's why the field was less crowded   Maybe it's too easy now...

Spot on.

[Sheila_Guthrie]

I used to love the smell of fresh mimeographs when I was in elementary school..

Mimeographs! I couldn't get the name off the tip of my tongue!    I'll tell you, we had some fun times, five or six teenage girls in the printing room, running off hundreds of pages. 

I still love the sound of the IBM Selectric. You could get balls with different fonts and sizes (pica and elite), too.

[Mike McIntyre]

Legend has it that Jack Kerouac wrote the first draft of On The Road on a 120-foot scroll fed through a typewriter. (It was actually eight long pieces of paper later taped together.) There is now a version of that classic called One the Road: The Original Scroll.
It's even available as a Kindle ebook:

http://www.amazon.com/Road-Original-Penguin-Classics-ebook/dp/B000UZQIUG/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2

[EStoops]

Oh, I love typing on a typewriter, and used to do letters on an old Sears I found.