Arthur Conan Doyle brought Sherlock Holmes to life in longhand. Ernest Hemingway liked to write standing up at his Royal typewriter set on a tall bookshelf at his home Finca Vigia in Havana – the Royal is still there today. One way or another most modern authors are blessed – for the most part – with the technology of the personal computer. Even if you insist on writing out your book with a pen and paper, as a handful still do, someone, somewhere will type it into a word processor at some stage. Changing the names of characters, making sweeping revisions and monitoring changes and word counts were once painful and tedious chores demanding hours of unrewarding work. We can now cut through these boring but necessary tasks with a few clicks of the mouse.
You’ll do yourself a big favour if you can find the right combination of tools, processes and routines from the outset for one very good reason: time. None of us has enough of it. Careers can’t be built – usually – by completing one manuscript a decade, however good it may be. In the field of popular fiction frequency – preferably once a year – is essential.
One element in this equation is the apparently simple question: how do you write a manuscript? The practical detail is often overlooked. Would-be authors fire up the word processor, set the line spacing to double and begin to tap out some words, hoping the rest of the process will fall into place at will. Not long after they find themselves staring at a blank page, with doubt and bewilderment creeping into an idea that seemed so alive and promising when it began.
We’ve already seen how planning a book project can help give it some firm foundations before a single word is written. You’re going to spend a lot of time with your chosen implements over the months, possibly years, to come. It makes sense to take a little time choosing the right ones before you begin. Changing in mid-course is likely to be time-consuming and wearisome. There is also one great fallacy that needs to be dispelled from the very outset. Yes, those first few pages are important. But not as important as you may think.