I've been reading recently with great pleasure is Phil Nugent's--exceptional quality of writing and thinking over there, with a mix of film and politics and other stuff--here's an extremely funny and sharp 'double-jointed' review* of "The Situation" and "Screamers," go and take a look...
*The coinage is courtesy of the Dizzies--where, by the way, there's currently a great Philip K. Dick quotation & link. The quotation's from PKD's ex-wife's memoirs, and I just love this passage, it is so much how I think about fiction-writing also (only I am not such an accurate typist, but I agree about the words coming out of the hands rather than the brain):
He said that the idea for a novel came to him in one intuitive flash, but he couldn’t tell me what the idea was “in under 60,000 words. The words come out of my hands, not my brain. I write with my hands. I type 160 words a minute, the rate of a really good legal secretary, and I’m very accurate.” One day he told me he typed sixty original manuscript pages without an error. He continued to tell me about this feat many times.
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Jeez. And fascinating.
ReplyDeleteWhile in school I used to track how many papers I'd type without any typos. It was most of them. It wasn't so much that I was accurate, or fast, but that I re-read everything as I was typing.
I can't imagine churning out 160 words per minute. My brain simply doesn't work that fast. But I guess his and your observation is that the hands get ahead of the brain, and still things work out. I haven't had the same experience. The main problem when I go fast is that I end up switching tenses, and I write passive and really long sentences.