How I Learned to Write (and Rewrite)
Originally published in South Florida Writers Association's Author's Voice
by David Frost
I
didn´t learn to write on a creative writing course. I learned
to write against the clock, on a small-town newspaper in the north of
England.
When
I was at high school, or grammar school, as it was then called in
England, it never occurred to me that English was something you
needed to study. Physics, chemistry, biology, geography, Latin,
French, German, economics, math – including trigonometry and
differential calculus – all those things, and more, I studied. I
even learned to play the violin and draw and paint after a fashion,
although I never mastered cricket. But English? English was just what
you spoke and wrote. Why should you have to study it?
So
at the age of sixteen I became a junior reporter on a local evening
newspaper. This was the traditional route into journalism in those
days, except that the normal stepping-off point was a weekly paper,
not a daily. Either I was lucky or I a wrote persuasive letter of
application.
I
didn't reply to an advert because you didn't see jobs for junior
reporters advertised. All I did was go to the public library where
I discovered Willings Press
Guide and copied the names and addresses of all newspapers within
reasonable traveling distance. This was how I first learned the
basics of research.
Some
wannabe journalists whose families had money stayed at school for a
further two years, went to university and studied something
irrelevant for three or fours years and then got a job as a
junior reporter. After just a year of evening classes I was way ahead
of them. I could type, had mastered the rudiments of shorthand plus a
smattering of law, and – most important of all – I had learned
how to write a set number of words every day, to a deadline on a
subject which was rarely my choice. No waiting for inspiration.
Sometimes
I was so close to the deadline that the copy boy was standing by me
as I hammered away on a typewriter, waiting to snatch each sheet away
as I finished it. Keys sticking, I frantically x-ed out my mistakes,
which became more numerous the longer the copy boy hovered. He pulled
each sheet of my copy out of the typewriter the instant I typed the
word “more” at the bottom of the page, ran into the next room to
hand it to a copyeditor, and was back hovering again long before I'd
finished the next page. This process was repeated until I typed the
word “end” on the final page.
Every
couple of weeks it was my turn for early duty, which involved sitting
with a pair of scissors and a pile of morning newspapers, plus the
previous day's local evening papers, snipping out interesting stories
while working my way through a list of phone numbers: police, river
police, ambulance, hospitals, courts. This was how I refined my
researching skills.
Any
interesting articles would be discussed in an editorial conference,
which of course I wasn't invited to, and were either rewritten –
there's no copyright in ideas – or a different angle was sought,
perhaps an interview with someone who was merely mentioned in the
original article but not quoted. The unimportant crumbs of stories
which were thrown at me taught me how to extract the essence of a
piece and rewrite it in a completely different form from that of the
original.
After
only a few months I wrote the newspaper's front-page lead. I wasn't
supposed to write it. I'd been sent to cover the town's horticultural
show – a typically boring event assigned to junior reporters.
Diligently I made list of prizewinners for the most perfect dahlias
and biggest, flawless leeks, and conducted a boring interview with
the horticultural association's boring president.
Then
disaster struck and things became less boring. A freak storm
demolished the marquees housing the show. I raced to the nearest
payphone and dictated the story out of my head. When I got back to
the office less than an hour later I was amazed to see my article
already printed as the lead story on the front page, with a different
intro, but basically as I wrote it.
Next
I became a sub-editor, which just means copyeditor in British
English, checking for errors – factual, grammatical, spelling,
punctuation – no spell checkers in those pre-PC days. Instead of
the Interet there were a few shelves of reference books: the
newspaper's stylebook, dictionaries,
Burke's Peerage, Crockford's
Clerical Directory, etc. Being a junior sub-editor,
my work was checked by an experienced copyeditor to start with, but
soon I was left to do the work unsupervised.
As
the most junior of the copyeditors I got to edit the unpaid
contributions of people like the president of the horticultural
society. These were sometimes so badly constructed, mispelt and
riddled with errors of grammar and punctuation that the quickest
solution was to sit down at a typewriter and do a complete rewrite
from start to finish.
This
was how I really honed my rewriting skills. The contributions were
often far too long, and in any case I soon discovered that even the
best writing can usually be improved by judicious cutting.
As
a copyeditor I also had to make sure that the stories fitted the
number of columns allotted to them – as far as possible – and
write headlines. The latter could be time-consuming, because you had
to make the letters fit, and computer programs such as QuarkXPress
were, like PCs, far way in the
unimaginable future.
The
chief sub-editor would specify how many lines he wanted for a
headline, and the font and size. There was a booklet full of
typefaces with tables giving the number of letters per column-width
for each size, and it was a question of trial and error, counting the
letters to see if they fit. The letter I and the lowercase L counted
as half a letter, while M and W were one-and-a-half letters.
Next
the story plus the headline went to a Linotype
machine operator, who retyped everything, so that the machine spewed
out slugs of text a line at a time. These lines of text were used to
produce curved metal plates which fitted onto the printing press.
First,
however, impressions were made of the slugs of type to check that the
articles did fit the columns allotted to them and proofreaders
working in pairs painstakingly checked these preliminary impressions
against the copyedited article.
Of
course there were still mistakes. So what did you do if a reporter
managed to misspell the mayor's name in a front-page article and the
copyeditor didn't notice it? Or if the Linotype operator typed the
mayor's name wrongly and the proofreaders didn't see the error? What
if nobody saw the mistake until the first newspaper came off the
printing press?
It
had to be chiseled. The press was stopped, a printer located the
misspelled name on the soft metal plate, and with a hammer and chisel
gave a delicate, experienced tap to remove the incorrect letters. Of
course the mayor's name was still there, but with a few letters
missing, which was merely a technical printing error, and not an
insult.
Years
later I had a regular freelance assignment, copyediting and
typesetting a 32-page monthly newsletter on tax havens, offshore
banking, money laundering, second passports and tax avoidance (not
tax evasion, which is something different, and illegal) and also
wrote many of the articles myself. I used a program called PageMaker
on an early, comparatively primitive Apple Mac. Helped by the Mac I
did the work of the writer, copyeditor, Linotype operator and
proofreader.
This
article is almost 1,400 words long and it took me about four hours to
write it. I knew it would. My target number of words per hour is 333
(1,000 words in 3 hours) and on average that's what I produce.
The
English author John Braine, whose novel
Room at the Top was the basis for the movie starring Simone
Signoret and Laurence Harvey, said, “...a writer is someone who
writes; a writer is someone who counts words.”
That
is the most useful advice on writing that I've encountered in a book.
More about it in a future article.
