Take care of your work

Part 3 Setting yourself up to love and not loathe yourself later

My favorite author Jame Ellroy writes all of his novels by hand with a pen and a yellow legal notepad. James Ellroy also has a team of assistants to go to the library and do research. They probably take his dog for walks. They certainly type his handwritten novels. I used to work in book publishing and we had an esteemed author on our team. He also wrote his books by hand on a pad of paper. Guess what? He had a team too. His wife and assistant would type his books. 

 In our last post we talked about your content. Here is where we talk about taking care of your content. If you are writing your content by hand with a pad and pen, I am going to try to dissuade you of that. I get it. I love a yellow legal pad and a pen. I love a typewriter. The romance is real. Meg Ryan can wax poetic about the smell of pencils and all that. But when you have a 70,000 word novel handwritten you have just put yourself in a big hole in getting started when it’s time to make the book. If you feel romantic about writing by hand you better feel even more romantic about typing it all again. 

The lesson here is, get organized and work in a format that is your friend. If you write a blog make sure you know how to access the posts later. If you write in Word, label your documents, put them in folders. Know where your content lives. If you plan to have art in your book, make sure your artist is working digitally or has access to a good scanner or camera and knows how to use it. 

Here comes the devil’s advocate for writing by hand. Writing by hand uses a different part of your brain than typing. As well, when you go back to type your book it gives you a very necessary run through your book to start your editing process. All is not lost if you go this route, in fact it might work for you. However, if you are not sworn to paper I would beseech you to use Word or Google Sheets. Your work will be saved, it will be in the cloud, and it will be editable, shareable, comment-able, and ultimately publishable. When it comes time to make your book, you are going to have a lot of those things to do that require the share function.

I really do love the allure of publishing in the past.  Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road on a 120 scroll of paper that he typed, cut, and taped together. Alas in no way shape or form could you get a book published from that in 2022. I was recently watching a travel show with my wife and the host went to Amsterdam. He got off the train and bikes were arranged in a cart system. My wife said when she was there, twenty something years ago, the bikes were in a pile. A rats nest of wheels, spokes, and handlebars. Perhaps this is a metaphor for publishing a book from a typewriter. 

Here is my advice in a line. Don’t work in a medium that is going to make your work harder and more expensive later.