Often I sort of work up and down the manuscript. I sometimes used to go ahead of myself to see what was going to happen next, to make certain it fits what was going to be happening soon.
When I was growing up the publishing world seemed so far away. When my mother wrote a book, she would look up the address of publishers on the backs of the books she owned and send off her manuscript.
I can tell from about 20 yards away when someone has a manuscript for me. I can just tell – they have that look.
Now I have to have the biggest P.O. box in the entire post office to get all the manuscripts coming in.
Good designers are no longer satisfied in taking the manuscript from someone and making it look nice. One of the things that I’ve tried to do is move from being a designer to a content provider.
I found a ‘lost’ manuscript called the Book of Soyga that had once belonged to Queen Elizabeth I’s court astrologer, John Dee, in Oxford’s Bodleian Library. Everybody thought it was the missing key to Dee’s interest in magic. Of course, it wasn’t really lost. It was there, in the catalog.
We all have our notions of sport. If I’d wanted to make my living climbing mountains, I wouldn’t have gone into publishing. Most of the time, you’re sitting in a dark room reading a manuscript.
Characters are incredibly important, but I tend to build them around the plot during the outline stage. However, once I’m writing the manuscript, the characters I’m writing dictate how the plot unfolds.
Creativity runs across many categories in life, from the arts-and-crafts project a mum or dad does with their kids, to the bestselling author’s manuscript, to the designs of the hairdresser, to the creations of the computer programming genius.
The question of manuscript changes is very important for literary criticism, the psychology of creation and other aspects of the study of literature.
I never saw any of my dad’s stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts.
Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts – the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.
I have a color-coded computer spreadsheet that divides things down to chapter fragments. Each character’s point-of-view is a different color. The text of the manuscript is color-coded the same way. The last thing I do before submitting the manuscript is turn all those colors back to black.
A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.
There are times when I’ll send a manuscript to an editor, and I’ll think it is the most likely project I’ve ever sent them. And they might call me the next morning and say they couldn’t tolerate it. That happens so frequently that I’ve given up any expectation of knowing what anybody’s going to like.
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