I can’t write longhand. I know a bunch of great writers did, and on even relatively recent books—Infinite Jest was written in longhand! Yikes!
But so I have my tools here. The most important one, the beast with primacy, is The Magnet. That’s the pet name for the IBM Selectric III that I write my fiction on (and which was a fantastic gift from Elana). Called The Magnet mostly because of its electric motor that sometimes won’t turn on till ten seconds after you flip the switch, but also a half-cornball come-hither-muse voodoo epithet.
So… why a typewriter. It’s not for reasons of affectation or insistent Ludditism, I swear. I’m just a believer in keeping writing and editing separate, and the typewriter’s like those weird braces that force a golfer to swing correctly. The belief’s not universal; a number of my friends edit as they work (or “in-between”), they’ll use word processing software to do a quick polish on the last paragraph before moving on. But I’m strictly against it. I don’t want to get stuck over-thinking a sentence that was perfectly fine. I want to spit everything out as fast as it comes, keep moving. The subconscious is where all the best work comes from; when you’re really into some fiction, writing and reading are both hypnagogic. I don’t want to kill the trance or the momentum by taking a break to fix ANYTHING. Let the word be misspelled, let the last sentence be stuff of grammatical nightmare, let the term or the name I can’t remember be a hastily typed “xxxx”.
As you can imagine, then, even though it’s a correcting typewriter, my correction ribbon never gets any use. The Magnet is for first drafts only. Editing is for later. More specifically, the first edit comes later when I retype the pages into a computer.
In the meantime, the typed pages need somewhere to live… They go in the fire-safe plastic/concrete box. Yes, they live in the box, which I’ve been assured will withstand flood or fire. (For the curious or likewise paranoid, this box is a Honeywell File Chest, which when I bought it was sold for $50 and free shipping. The price seems to have gone up… They may have realized offering free shipping for $50 purchases and then selling something that costs exactly $50 and weighs over thirty pounds was a bad idea.)
And then for screenwriting, I use Celtx, which is in so many ways better than than its competitors, and on top of that, is open source and free. I know that my own experience of Final Draft was filled with amazement, a lot of head-scratching along the lines of: “This is a ‘finished’ software product? Why are there so many paint bugs? Why is this abomination a ‘standard’?”
The other thing about Celtx is that it has a lot of built in tools for managing your film if it’s something you’re going to shoot yourself. You can record all sorts of information, like phone numbers and availability of your cast, contact info for locations, details on props you’ve acquired or ones you still need, audio files for temp or final score… And then again, if you just want to write, you can forget about those tools, and it’ll just be the straightforward script software you wanted. The other nice thing is that if you feel obligated to pay something for the work that went in to making Celtx, they’ll only encourage you to donate $5 to Against Malaria.
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[...] the basic approach is the same as I discussed in my Accoutrements post, but the thing that really struck a nerve was the implied fear of going back to revise or [...]
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