The words on the page — somewhere (Anne Rooney)

Last month I blogged about the untidiness/tidiness of writers' work spaces; this time it gets personal, with a peek inside some notebooks and drafts. I'm still on the side of messy, no matter how hard I try. But there are people who are even messier, which I find encouraging.





Not my role model. Lewis Carroll even ruled margins in his notebooks and then kept within them. Freak.

 

Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. So efficient that he seems to have written it in the G section of his address book. Must have had an extensive address book, as it's not a short novel.

George Orwell, Nineteen Eight-Four. Pretty messy.

















But Orwell isn't a patch on Flaubert. He wins, hands down for L'Education, as he appears to have crossed the whole thing out anyway.

Karl Marx gets a special mention as he left a few words in tact.




It's not just the manuscript. You get a second chance to be messy when you mark up the pages (or used to; Adobe Acrobat doesn't offer quite the same potential for scribble and scrawl).





This is James Joyce. Bet his editor was pleased. Not.


 







Few of us have marked-up, handwritten manuscripts of our books these days, which is a sad loss for future scholars. But must of us have notebooks at least. Where do yours fall on the spectrum from Carroll to Flaubert/Marx?

Anne Rooney
Out soon, Arcturus, April 2019: