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It always amuses me when I see writers portrayed in films. Our hero — and it is invariably always a man — who is a moody and sensitive sort, arrives in the big metropolis with his typewriter, a packet of cigarettes and a whiskey bottle. We see him sitting at a desk facing window, tapping away at his typewriter and occasionally dragging on his cigarette. If he is swept away with creativity he types feverishly through the day and night. However, if he is stuck, he pulls out sheet after sheet from the typewriter roll, flinging them into the bin in exasperation and working his way through the bottles of whiskey. Occasionally, he stares broodily out of the window. Eventually, he finishes his manuscript and ties up in brown paper to post off to the publisher.
The next thing you know, he has received a letter from the publisher and is waving it around in his local bar, buying drinks for his friends to celebrate the publication of his book. In the next scene, he is swanning around at a swanky launch party, the toast of the town and on his way to becoming A Famous Writer.
All this happens within five minutes of film time!
The movie version of writers came to mind recently because I have been preparing the draft of my third book to send to the publishers. This is the book on New Trends in International Communications which I am co-authoring with Silvia Cambie and although it is not a novel like my last two books, the process of manuscript preparation is exactly the same. You have to keep drafting and redraft thing until you are absolutely happy with what you’ve written, checking and rechecking for typos, grammatical mistakes and errors in context and sense. You then had to make sure that the formatting is consistent e.g. that each paragraph is justified and consistently spaced, that key terms that recur are consistently spelt or capitalised alright italicised and that your page numbering is seamless from chapter to chapter. You need to check the word count of each chapter and add them all up together to see whether your total word count falls within the required thresholds. You need to make sure that the header and footer has the correct references to the book title, your author name and the relevant chapter. It is tedious, tedious, tedious…
We are due to deliver the manuscript at the end of November and Silvia and I have been having regular meetings to make sure that the sections that we are respectively writing work together. She is putting the finishing touches to her chapters and we then need to collaborate on the Foreword before the final bundle is ready to go. And the last thing we will need to do is to collate the hard copy into the correct order, prepare 2 copies to send to the publisher and further copies to retain ourselves. These days of course we also had to prepare the electronic version to send out at the same time.
Once it is with Kogan Page, our editor will no doubt come back with notes and there’ll be another period where we will have to do some further rewriting and re-crafting before the final version will be ready to go to print. The publication date has been set for July 2009, which is around nine months away to give us and Kogan Page sufficient time for the editorial process, the copyediting process, the print preparation process and also to fit in with their overall 2009 catalogue.
A lot longer than five minutes, wouldn’t you say?
I remember that as a teenager, one of the reasons I was inspired to be a writer was the way that the lives of writers are portrayed on screen. In the movies, it all seems so glamorous and intense — and easy. Well, now that I’ve actually become a writer, I have to laugh at my youthful innocence!
Photo: thanks to (waltzing) matilda from flickr.com (CCL)
