10/05/2025
๐๐จ๐ผโ๐ป A new project Iโve been working on recently is for a dear family friend, whoโs a fantastic author! Nick lives in over in New Zealand and is trying to grow online as he prepares to publish a new novel! ๐
When I last visited Auckland, Nick explained that publishers now look at authors social media presence and asked if I could set up a page and help him grow online! Thatโs exactly what weโre doing right now! ๐ค
Check out his page - Nick Marsden, Author
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Even Shakespeare, whether he/she was an individual, or a team of they/them writers, would have had writing processes by which there may have been several iterations and changes before the final product came to light. ๐
My own processes make me wonder whether I am such an unlikely writer in this digital age, and one that a digital native might snigger at. ๐
Here I am posting on facebook, but before I do that, I start by putting everything down by hand in a notebook. โHow Jurassic!โ I hear you say, as I am certain that it would attract derision and disbelief from a digital native. ๐
For my part I donโt mind, because writing is, always was, and always will be a process. For me, putting it down in long hand is just part of my own process. And I know that when I have put everything down on paper โ in ink, lol โ I know that this is just the start. Because when I start typing it out on my laptop, I find myself changing and re-arranging things straight-away. โ
So, the one-step, becomes a two-step process, which later becomes a three, four, five, more-steps process when I start making more revisions. This can involve cutting, pasting, dragging and dropping, deleting, font changing, etcetera. By now the footprint (or fingerprint) of my writing becomes a complex, multi-step affair. ๐
My fatherโs approach, as a pre-PC journalist, involved four fingers hammering down on a manual machine to produce a one-shot, typed draft. He would then make insertions, deletions and corrections by hand before submitting his piece to a newspaper; usually by dictating it over the telephone. ๐คฉ
Compare this with the epic approach used by Jack Kerouac when, according to legend, he wrote โOn the Roadโ in just three weeks on one continuous scroll. Was that the drugs? Well, maybe; and who cares? But that three-week novel became something of an urban myth. ๐
In fact, he is said to have drafted his ideas in numerous note-books, form which he distilled his ideas. He then taped the ends of translucent paper together to form a continuous scroll which he could feed into the carriage of his typewriter. He did this, he claimed, to tap into the flow of his subconscious: โI let the words flow out in uninterrupted waves, hardly knowing what I was doing except that I was writing.โ โ๐ป
That sounds uplifting and certainly inspired. But he was as human as any writer, and by all accounts, the scroll is filled with hand-written edits and corrections. Regardless, it is an amazing process. โญ๏ธ
However, even with the benefit of computers (and drugs), few could claim to have such an immaculate subconscious flow. ๐
At least not with great results. Iโm sure some might disagree, especially if they are participants in the nanowrimo contest, where writers spend a month (luxury having an extra week over Kerouac) writing a novel. ๐
Personally, I have not read any naowrimo novels, and nor have I written one. My novels take me years, but call me slow-mo! Forgive me if I am wrong, but it would seem a miracle to write a perfect novel in a month. Perfection would surely require several iterations of revision, editing, re-writing, corrections, deletions, and perhaps the essential step of getting critical feedback from a reader or multiple readers. So even with computers we need these aforementioned steps! ๐
Oh, alright, an oh-so-cool-and-with-it detractor might say that a novel could be written using AI in less thanโฆ10, 20, 30 minutes? Well maybe so, but this would not be art, and I bet that it would be a pile of sh # #! ๐คฃ
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