Being a writer in Ye Olden Dayes (or the time before computers were a thing)

[SilentParrot]

Just watching Pride and Prejudice and wondering what it would have been like to be a writer in Jane's time. Everything written out longhand with scratchy nibs. By the time she'd done all her edits she must have written each manuscript out multiple times. So much more physically involving than pootering about with a laptop. And I wonder what all the paper and ink would have cost her.

Hope she rewarded herself with a fortifying glass of wine at the end of each day.

You can find original manuscripts online, scanned, full of cross outs & rewrites (!)

On the plus side, you could so easily get rid of awkward characters if it suited your plot - have them very conveniently die of an ‘apoplexy’ or ‘a putrid sore throat’, or sad to say, in childbirth.

I’m just re-reading Middlemarch, where Dorothea finds out too late that the much older man she was so keen to marry, was nothing like she’d imagined. Still, easy enough to have him die of ‘fatty degeneration of the heart’ after only a year or so.

It’s not so easy for authors nowadays!

I typed on manual typewriter my first book in 1977 and used carbon copy to have my own retained copy of it. Not handwritten but similar as you could not store the text.

And back then there would have only been one copy of the final manuscript. If it got lost or damaged you’d have to write the whole thing out again.

haha true.

Getting caught in a downpour and dying of fever two days later was a reliable way of getting rid of a troublesome character too.

I just about remember using carbon copy paper in primary school for something or other in the 1980s. But yes, clattering a book out on a typewriter looks pretty intense too. The fear of some disaster befalling your pages must have been real.

My dad wrote books on an old typewriter. Yes, carbon copies. And a tiny bit of paper that worked like tippex, that you used to cover over a misspelling or wrong word with chalky whiteness, and then you could type over it again. Can’t remember what it was called.

Keys were on long spindles arms and you had to hit them hard. And the type writer ‘dinged’ when you approached the end of each line!

According to that Mason Currey book, Daily Rituals, she had to hide her writing under her sewing so the servants and guests wouldn't suspect she was writing.

Must've been so stressful to balance the actual writing with the constant threat of social ruin.

It still exists!
https://amzn.to/3Mr7NFG

Weren't they just tippex strips, Alwaystheweather?

I still think of liquid tippex as terribly modern as it always used to be in paper form for manual typewriters.