- Rogues, Widows and Orphans by Rebecca Lee (Profile Books £20, 304pp)
Ernest Hemingway had a simple trick for making the start of each day’s writing as painless as possible: he would finish the previous day in the middle of a sentence.
The novelist Ann Patchett, on the other hand, got herself in work mode by attaching a signing-in sheet to her office door.
Scandalous sixties: reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover
And D. H. Lawrence, as you might expect from the author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, sought inspiration by climbing mulberry trees naked.
If you think writers are strange, you should see their readers. Barry Humphries had a collection of 25,000 books – a clear case of tsundoku, the Japanese word for buying more books than you can read.
And one woman, when challenged while trying to steal Andrew Morton’s biography of Princess Diana from a London shop, burst into tears, able only to say ‘she was the people’s princess’.
Lee’s fascinating book is interested in what happens when making a book goes wrong. This might be with printing when, in the days of metal type, you would occasionally see the line ‘etaoin shrdlu’ by mistake because the typesetter had forgotten to remove a row of letters, which were arranged by frequency of use.
‘Rogues’ and ‘orphans’, meanwhile, are words left isolated at the beginning or end of a paragraph.
Or it might be a problem with getting your book read at all.
The Catholic Church only ditched its list of banned books in 1966, while in 1940 the Soviet Union had 5,000 censors – more than it had writers.
Returning to Lady Chatterley, the prosecuting counsel in the 1960 obscenity case was asked how he decided whether to take action against a book. He replied: ‘I put my feet up on the desk and start reading. If I get an erection, we prosecute.’
There’s encouragement here for any would-be author who’s been rejected by a publisher.
Rogues, Widows and Orphans is available now from the Mail Bookshop
It happened to many of the greats, including Rudyard Kipling (‘I’m sorry, Mr Kipling, but you just don’t know how to use the English language’) and Marcel Proust: ‘Rack my brains as I may I can’t see why a chap should need 30 pages to describe how he turns over in bed.’
Although, as Lee points out, anyone who’s tried reading Proust may agree.
The industry has changed a lot since Johannes Gutenberg made the first printing press.
These days anyone can self-publish on Amazon – in 2007 only 3,804 books appeared that way; by 2023 it was 1.4 million. People are also worried about the implications of artificial intelligence.
Could a computer write a novel? Perhaps, but it will always need human input from which to learn. If AI only ever copies from itself, the quality of its work will slowly diminish. Computer scientists call this ‘system collapse’.
And every writer, be they cyber or human, needs an editor. Though Mark Twain had his doubts about that: ‘Yesterday [my publisher] wrote that the printer’s proof-reader was improving my punctuation for me, and I telegraphed orders to have him shot without giving him time to pray.’
