This essay appears in New Adventures in Literature, edited by Simon Groth
So You Think You’re Going to Make and eBook
For my seventeenth birthday I got a typewriter. It was
an Olivetti letter-writer, bright red. I planned to be a novelist. So in the
university vacation, when I was not working in the ice-cream factory, or as a
waitress, I taught myself to type. I still have the Pitman’s Business Typewriting, with its thick grey cardboard cover
and lovely round blue, green and yellow typewriter keys. Today I am typing on a
MacBook Pro, and between this and the Olivetti there have been many other
machines. I am learning to make an ebook.
One day in 1987 I had lunch in Fitzroy with Diana
Gribble, my publisher at McPhee Gribble. As we crossed busy Brunswick Street on
our way back to the McPhee Gribble office, Diana said she thought it would be a
good idea if I were to write a book on how to write fiction. This moment has
remained with me, vivid in my memory, an illumination in heavy traffic. Diana
died in 2011, and at her funeral the thought of that instant in Brunswick
Street kept flashing into my mind.
This happened in the days before writing courses had
come into being in Australian universities; there were no such things as
writers’ centres. However there were some initiatives from state governments in
the area of the arts, and I was involved in a program of manuscript assessment.
I was Assessor Number Eight. I was anonymous and so were the writers whose work
I assessed. I had been writing letters to the authors – yes, I typed them out
and put them in the mail. I wonder now which designs were on the postage
stamps. The letters went to people I referred to as ‘Dear Writer’. I kept
copies of these letters – possibly some of them still exist in my files – and I
realised I already had the core of my book on writing.
So in 1988 Dear
Writer was published. I licensed it to McPhee Gribble which in 1989 became
an imprint of Penguin. The book was published by Virago in London. By the time
the licence came up for renewal in 1995 my publisher was Random House and so I
licensed it to them, and wrote a revised version of the text. Between the end
of the Penguin licence and the beginning of the Random one, I had a request
from a university for fifty copies. There were not fifty copies in existence so
I printed a limited edition of a hundred copies in a plain cover with Wild and
Woolley, a Sydney publisher who specialized in producing small fast print runs.
In 2010 Random decided not to renew the licence and the book went out of print.
Since then I have had many requests from universities for copies of Dear Writer. It occurred to me that
perhaps the time had come to see it as an ebook.
The file of the proofs from Random House (which was soon
to merge with Penguin) had not survived the various transfers from one computer
to another. I realised I would first need to scan the text. It so happened that
I had only one copy in my possession. If I tore it apart for the purpose of
scanning, I would end up with no copies at all. It seemed wrong not to have at
least one copy of my own book. You’d think that I could find one somewhere, at
least online, but no. Although there were plenty of copies in Indonesian. So I
persuaded a friend to relinquish her copy in exchange for a copy of the limited
Wild and Woolley edition (which uses the original, not the revised 1995 text).
The process of scanning, while being perhaps elegant and astonishing, was
tedious. As the book on my left shrank page by page and the pile of loose pages
on my right grew, the data on my laptop lay in between the two.
When the scanned pages at last became a file, I began an
exhaustive revision of the text. While the basics of writing fiction remain
constant, the vast and rapid changes and developments in technology,
publishing, and teaching had to be acknowledged, reflected and addressed in the
new version of the book. After all, today people write novels on twitter. The
notion of the letters is now quaint in its formality, but to abandon it would
mean losing the tone of the book, and it was this tone that students and
readers found particularly helpful and engaging. I say ‘readers’ because this
is a book that can be read as a piece of fiction as well as a manual of
instruction. It isn’t simply a matter of tone; Dear Writer is an enactment of its own principles. Interestingly,
people frequently refer to Dear Writer
as Dear Reader. I assume they feel
the text speaks to them, that they, the readers, are the writer being
addressed.
There are two characters: Writer and Virginia. Writer is
a middle-aged woman living somewhere in rural Australia and writing short
stories which she sends to Virginia for assessment. The novelist Virginia, as
it happens, is a character from my novel The
Bluebird Café . The readers of Dear
Writer never see the script of the story under review, but must build it up
in their imaginations. There are no letters from Writer. Because the characters
are of their time, which was long ago in 1988, they think about the virtues of
writing with pens compared with working on a typewriter, and then on a
computer. I remember being resistant to the image of the old Royal typewriter
on the cover of the Random House edition, because I thought it was suggesting
the text was nostalgic and ossified. Yet people said they loved the image. The
cover of the Virago version was never admired by anyone I ever heard of; it
suggests, with its blood red woman at a typewriter, that writing fiction is
something to do with menstruation.
You can see some of the problems that changes in
technology have introduced to the revision and re-presentation of a book like
this. Often when I see the phrase ‘changes in technology’, the image of Tess of
the d’Urbervilles comes to mind; that tragic emblem of a young woman trapped in
social revolution, destroyed. Writing, revising takes courage; I am brave
enough to do this.
I must now switch to a present tense narrative, because
as I write this essay I am still working on the revision of Dear Writer in preparation for its new
appearance. I say ‘appearance’ rather than ‘publication’ because I have a sense
that something dramatic and revolutionary is happening to it, and that
‘publication’ is not a term that serves the purpose.
I have considered the fact that most of the students of
writing today (2013) are very young, that they use social media, that they are
probably keen to by-pass traditional publishing, that traditional publishing is
also morphing even I sit here at my laptop, that those young students of
writing are probably writing novels with their forefingers and thumbs on their iPhones,
that possibly anything Virginia might say to Writer about, say, the agreement
of a verb with its subject, is not going to matter to anybody much.
Yet I know that it does matter, and that it will
continue to matter. I am not talking about rigidity and inflexibility and
fossilisation, but about clarity and freedom. The more you know about how
language behaves, the better equipped you are to use it, the more power you
have over your own thoughts and ideas. Not so long ago I was teaching a
university course. At the end of the second session I asked the students what
areas of writing they would like me to cover in the course. They asked me to
teach them grammar. In the early nineties I taught a course at an American
college where the students wrote all their work, including their journals, on
computers. A group of them came to me after class and said they were going to
England for a semester and would have to write their journals by hand. They
asked me to teach them how to do that. I know, and not just from those
examples, that the things Virginia and Writer are able to convey are still
important to people learning to write fiction, and I am keen to re-fashion the
book in such a way that the original flavour is preserved, while the nature of
the world into which it will go continues to change.
The challenges I face are not just those presented by
the current technologies, or by the changes in publishing, or the changes in
hardware and software, but the changes in the whole climate and make-up of
readers and students and writers themselves.
So I think I am going to make an ebook. By the time it
is done, ebooks might be obsolete, might be the luxury houses built on the edge
of the cliff, only to disappear beneath the waves as the level of the sea rises
in the heat of the blazing sun.
Having converted the old Random House book into a Word file, I then
completely revised the text, taking into account the changed landscape of
writing and reading, and I was ready to meet the technology of the ebook.
Ready, it turns out, but not really quite able. I had to admit that I could not
do this alone, and searched for support and help. There are websites offering
methods and varying levels of support, but it was clear to me that they were not
going to be my thing. There are of course people who can just get in and take
up the challenge of the technology – I was not one of those. I confess I had
found it hard enough to do the conversion to scans and then into Word. I think
I did quite well for someone who didn’t know what they were doing.
Ebook help eventually came in the form of Bronwyn Mehan
who is the publisher of Spineless Wonders, a publisher dedicated to, among
other things, the production of ebooks, or books without paper, books without
spines. Bronwyn offered to take over the making of the ebook – but then she
pointed out something I had been trying not to think: she said a book such as Dear
Writer is a book that many readers and students of writing like to hold in
their hand, to consult in the old-fashioned way, to use the Index for quick
reference, to keep on the bookshelf. This was obviously true, because I had
found it impossible to get hold of a copy of Dear Writer until a fellow writer
volunteered to let me have hers. So Bronwyn’s suggestion was that before she
produced the ebook, maybe she could produce the paperback. The new title would
be Dear Writer Revisited.
We would proceed from the paperback version to the ebook
version, the ebook requiring its own specific layout and other elements needed
for electronic delivery. How to manage an index in an ebook? Such matters would
impact on the text.
The ebook exists, and the hard copy of Dear Writer Revisited, published by Spineless Wonders, is in shops, in classrooms, in libraries, on the bookshelves of writers.
