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.
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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:
3 comments:
I'm like you and on the side of messy with working notebooks - but never any messier than George Orwell! I do tend to get tidier as things progress though. Notes for later drafts are much neater :)
Thanks for all these, Anne. Cheering to the soul in an odd way, though I do suspect the tidiness of G for Grapes. He probably had all his untidy observational notebooks beside him.
As far the last one! Pah! I know that many editors can be very very good and skilled but I do have such great respect for all the editors, secretaries, typists (wives, sisters etc) of past eras who had to sort out such stuff. They were often women, and their work and efforts often unacknowledged. (Says daugher of a very proud typist and secretary.)
For all I know, people are handing in untidy, half-finished m/s to editors even today?
Love these! When I was very young, and just starting school, I was regularly told to stand up to be hit on the palm with a wooden ruler, because I pressed so hard on the fountain pen and always had messy writing. It didn't work. i still do. My notebooks look as if I speak a strange language known to nobody else. I've also taken to writing only on the righthand side. No idea why. It's part of the thinking process.
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