Prolific writing in pre-typewriter days?

Pencrafter

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I know from experience that one can lay down many thousands of words with fountain pen. However, editing and revisions are a hard slog. Nowhere near as fast as with computer or even typewriter.

There were very prolific writers back when a dip was *the* writing technology.

How’d they do it? Their lifespans were shorter yet their production of significant works was equal or greater than today’s writers.

Very curious if anyone can shed light on this idea. Thank you!
 

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The people doing the prolific writing were upper middle class and aristocrats.

They didn't have a 40 hour week job, or heavy housekeeping or childcare responsibilities, because they had servants.

They often used the services of a professional scribe and/or secretary to produce clean copy.

And they were generally male.
 

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Does anyone know how jk rowling managed the first Harry Potter? She wrote in a coffee shop all day, divorcing / divorced, very little if any income.. sure she had no money for a computer...

We’ve all seen her hand-written story-tracking sheets she made to keep track of plots and sub-plots..
 

Enlightened

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Does anyone know how jk rowling managed the first Harry Potter? She wrote in a coffee shop all day, divorcing / divorced, very little if any income.. sure she had no money for a computer...

We’ve all seen her hand-written story-tracking sheets she made to keep track of plots and sub-plots..

I saw a documentary of J.K. Rowling going through some kind of museum that has her original papers. She did everything on paper.... Drew her map of Hogwarts, huge lists of things (spells, characters, locations, and so forth). She borrowed from mythology and some herbology book spilling the secrets doctors held of medicinal herbs. I forget the name of it.

George Lucas had numerous binders of hand typed or handwritten notes he later hired a guy to digitize.
 

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In this documentary, did she discuss the toil involved in editing and how she managed it?
 

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John Updike made his humble-brag about always writing out everything by hand and then either typing it up or having it typed up. He was prolific, but he was also a professional writer = he didn't have to work another job for his livelihood.
 

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In this documentary, did she discuss the toil involved in editing and how she managed it?

No. I understand she had many extensions of the books. She had something called a Series Grid that mapped out components she had to address in each book.

I am attempting a grand series as Rowling, Tolkein, and Lucas did, but for screenplays only. For me, I created digital documents to make sure I know what goes where and when. I also created a checkoff system when I do editing. I'll compare my script treatment to my screenplay and use my treatment as a checklist of things covered per script (and in grand series / saga).

Rowling claimed she knew how to tell a story. Granted, but she knew a lot of other things as well, such as: project management; literary devices; literary techniques; asset management; too many things to list. I assume she had some kind of checklists to make sure she got every component in and in the right sequences to fulfill her series symmetry, magic system, character secrets and reveals, and what not.
 
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angeliz2k

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I know from experience that one can lay down many thousands of words with fountain pen. However, editing and revisions are a hard slog. Nowhere near as fast as with computer or even typewriter.

There were very prolific writers back when a dip was *the* writing technology.

How’d they do it? Their lifespans were shorter yet their production of significant works was equal or greater than today’s writers.

Very curious if anyone can shed light on this idea. Thank you!

Okay, many things to note:

1. When writing with pen and ink, particularly the sort of pen you need to regularly dip in ink, you are forced to slow down and think before you write. You get a sense of this when reading 19th-century (and even 20th-century) writings and letters. They are almost always very thoughtful in ways that hastily-written text messages (or forum posts...) are not. This means that the writer had, most likely, formed the sentence in his/her head before writing it down, and probably the whole paragraph, scene, and chapter. It was very deliberate (and this was encouraged in students and young people: the art of writing a good letter). It's simply a different approach to words, and I imagine this level of care before putting down your words led to less need for hefty revision, generally.

2. People literally cut and pasted. There probably would've been fewer drafts, but they did manage to fiddle around with their words. Lincoln did a lot of this cutting, rearranging, pasting, and copying out [or he got one of his secretaries to make a fair copy, though he would have cheerfully done it himself if he hadn't had a secretary].

3. People's lifespans were not necessarily shorter. Life expectancy was less, but a large part of that was because of the high childhood mortality rate. People could and did live into their 70s, 80s, and 90s. Life expectancy is an average, which will be pulled down by extremes (in this case childhood deaths). And anyway, I don't see how general life expectancy would affect the output of any particular writer. They didn't even know what the life expectancy was. And even if they did know, they wouldn't be sitting there counting down their years, because that's not how life expectancy works, obvs.

4. Not all of these prolific writers were upper middle class or aristocrats. Many were professionals, or women who had household duties but, for various reasons, might also have free time. All you needed was the ability to write, paper, ink, and time. I mean, Sam Clemens wasn't particularly wealthy and was far from an aristocrat. Same with, e.g., Louisa May Alcott (though her family was highly educated and basically comfortable). J.M. Barrie's family was very poor (though he got a good education). Of course, many, many people did not have these advantages, but it wasn't just the wealthy who did.

5. Mostly, writers just made time to write, like modern writers do. They got up early, stayed up late, got in words after work, etc. I think that's the main point. They just worked hard at it. It took them a while to write out a fair copy of their manuscript by hand ("manuscript", of course, literally means a script written by hand), but that was just how it was.

6. Many of these really prolific writers were being paid by the word, so it was their job to put out as many words as possible. Generally, these writers started out slowly, working as a clerk or some such until they started making enough money from those words to be able to do nothing but churn out those words, which then netted them more money. It was a whole publishing model.

But I think it comes down to hard work. They managed all those words through hard work.
 

Pencrafter

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Thank you, angeliz2k...very helpful and informative
 

benbenberi

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Anthony Trollope was a professional bureaucrat who worked most of his adult life for the Post Office. (He's said to have invented the pilar box.)

He also published 49 novels and some dozen non-fiction volumes, in addition to short stories, between 1850 and 1884. He was the definition of a prolific author. And his quality was pretty consistent -- there are very few outright duds in the oeuvre, though of course some are clearly better than the rest.

How did he do it? He got up early every morning and wrote from 5:30 to 8:30 with his watch in front of him, and a quota of 250 words every 15 minutes. (So, 3000 words every morning.) If he happened to reach The End of a novel in the middle of a session, he would get out a fresh sheet of paper to start Chapter 1 of the next. At 8:30? He put down the pen, put away the day's output and went to the office for a full day at his day job.

His reputation suffered somewhat after his death, when his Autobiography revealed this daily quota, and the fact that he was intentionally writing for money -- how bourgeois and uninspired!
 

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The people doing the prolific writing were upper middle class and aristocrats.

They didn't have a 40 hour week job, or heavy housekeeping or childcare responsibilities, because they had servants.

They often used the services of a professional scribe and/or secretary to produce clean copy.

And they were generally male.

Trollope said that he wrote every day from 5:30 to 8:30 am, 250 words every quarter hour, and then went to his full-time job at the post office. If he finished a book before 8:30, he took out a fresh piece of paper and started a new one. That sound to me more like enormous self-discipline than relying on support staff.
 

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Trollope said that he wrote every day from 5:30 to 8:30 am, 250 words every quarter hour, and then went to his full-time job at the post office. If he finished a book before 8:30, he took out a fresh piece of paper and started a new one. That sound to me more like enormous self-discipline than relying on support staff.

He had a servant bring him coffee at 5.30 every morning.

It was my practice to be at my table every morning at 5.30 A. M.; and it was also my practice to allow myself no mercy. An old groom, whose business it was to call me, and to whom I paid £5 a year extra for the duty, allowed himself no mercy. During all those years at Waltham Cross he was never once late with the coffee which it was his duty to bring me. I do not know that I ought not to feel that I owe more to him than to any one else for the success I have had. By beginning at that hour I could complete my literary work before I dressed for breakfast.

https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/t/trollope/anthony/autobiography/complete.html
 

lonestarlibrarian

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G.K. Chesterton is probably one of the most prolific writers I'm fond of. He has a great knack for awesome phrases. He never went to college, started out life writing art critic articles for magazines, and ended up writing over 100 books, 5 plays, 5 novels, about 200 short stories, hundreds of poems, and was a contributor to over 200 other books. He wrote over 4,000 newspaper essays, partly because he worked as a columnist for 30 years for the Illustrated News, and 13 years for the Daily News, and ran his own newspaper on top of it all. I like him best as a mystery author, and respect him as an intellectual--- he considered himself a journalist--- and I could never read all of his stuff in my lifetime if I tried. :)

He had a bad habit of missing trains, and did a lot of his writing in train stations. :)

Wodehouse is another of my favorite prolific authors. His father's retirement was in rupees, which did poorly against the pound right as Wodehouse was ready to go off to Oxford. So he went into banking instead, and in the evenings wrote comic pieces for magazines, and eventually became a columnist and the resident lyricist at a theatre. He ultimately wrote 90 books, 40 plays, 200 short stories, and more.

Me... I scroll through the same five or six websites for hours at a time, hitting refresh and seeing what's different since the last time I peeked. :p
 

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G.K. Chesterton...never went to college

Small point. He did go to college -- he went to the Slade (UCL), but didn't complete the degree. His time at the Slade had a profound impact on his writing.

Me... I scroll through the same five or six websites for hours at a time, hitting refresh and seeing what's different since the last time I peeked. :p

I feel seen.
 

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Trollope said that he wrote every day from 5:30 to 8:30 am, 250 words every quarter hour, and then went to his full-time job at the post office. If he finished a book before 8:30, he took out a fresh piece of paper and started a new one. That sound to me more like enormous self-discipline than relying on support staff.

Trollope, like Twain by the time he was writing novels, had a housekeeper and house maids/laundry maids.

Dickens had household servants, secretarial help, and a spouse to run his house. Woolf, Austen, Hawthorne, etc. had household servants.

Pretty much anyone who owned their own home had servants, or in the U.S., slaves. There was so much hard physical labor involved in running a house that if the primary bread winner had a job that produced income, then the household needed paid labor to function. Laundry, the labor involved in heating the house, basic kitchen tasks (even if the lady of the house cooked, there was probably a scullery maid or house maid or nurse maid). Transportaion required horses; that required someone to groom, feed, and clean the stable. Households and hired labor/servants were the nature of upper middle class life in the late eighteenth through early twentieth century, though in the U.S. pre-Civil war, much of the labor was performed by slaves.

It's a bit different for women writers; Austen never married, neither did Louisa May Alcott.
 
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benbenberi

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All those servants the Victorians depended on -- we depend on them today too. Only since 1900 they've been transformed by technology. Now we call them appliances, utilities, and computers. And outsourcing -- Uber, Grub Hub, Task Rabbit, & the rest of the "gig economy" are all just on-demand versions of the servant class.