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.