Tools of the Trade

I began my writing career on a typewriter. A little green Olivetti that my dad gave me, as my handwriting was too messy for him to read the stories and poetry I wrote otherwise.  Possibly one like this, apparently dating to the 60s and currently selling on Etsy for $1,200.

I have no idea what my typing speed is these days - thanks to word processing I can write fast and dirty and go back and fix it right way. I never took typing or keyboarding skills in school - afraid it would consign me to a future as a secretary, at a time when I had much grander goals! Actress. Foreign news correspondent. Farmer...

In those days making corrections was a tedious thing involving dabbing White Out on the page and typing over it, or employing a kind of tape feature on my IBM Selectric machine (later in a job where I was in effect, a secretary) which always got tied in knots and made more messes than it fixed. 

Making major changes often required cutting up the MS pages, arranging and rearranging, then starting all over! One job I had introduced a Word Processing platform, the work station of which I was introduced to as if it might explode any minute. This in fact only produced galley pages which I still had to cut, paste and glue for the newsletters, brochures and flyers I produced at the time. Along with the liberal use of Letraset for headings. Remember that?

My first IBM home computer required three disks to be inserted and removed - one with the operating system, a second with the word-processing program (MS Word, then, now and always!) and a third for saving files.

These days I work on a Mac laptop, eschewing sophisticated programs like Scrivener, instead opting for tried and true Word. I can almost make it sing, dance and do the laundry - I wish. But thanks to liberal use of Headings and the View/Sidebar/Navigation feature, I can move around any document easily, and include pages of research notes, outlines, character studies, and anything else I need. If you want to check it out, there's some good info here. 

I would not be without it.

But sometimes I revert to the old card method - which is what I am using right now as I work of my perennial WIP Return of the Summer Fish. The 40,000 word novel is a mess; I wrote in random scenes and right now am trying to piece them together in some kind of coherent order.

So I am back to writing notes of each scene on a separate card ("In which" scene goal statements, Throughline notes, main scene Action and Ending, and Misc which is about almost anything else I note in the text). I also have a master document of all the Footnotes I have made in the process of working through the story.

I just hope it all make sense when I lay them out, get down on the floor and start moving them around. Something my 73-year-old knees are not too keen on.