EDITING WITH STONE AND CHISEL

by Steve Steinbock

I never thought of myself as a Luddite. I don’t run out and purchase every new gadget that comes on the market, but neither do I shy away. Back in the day when I first heard talk of computers being used as writing tools—“word processing” they called it—I was pretty keen on the idea.

It must have been around 1982. Personal computers had been around for a few years already. I was in Grad School, and getting tired of using borrowed typewriters. That was when I was still popping on a stovetop. (Gee, maybe I am a Luddite). I bought a Commodore 64 and never looked back.

Today there is a whole generation of adults that never had to use a typewriter. Imagine that. The idea that when you made a mistake, you either had to use White Out, cover the offending word with lots of #######, or tear out the page and retype it from the top.

Retyping, now that’s an archaic concept. Writers had to actually retype what they’d written. Each draft wasn’t just an edited version of a previous document, it was an entire retyping, and incorporating changes along the way. There’s something to be said about that. I recall that I often gained insights while retyping essays and stories for school. As I followed the earlier draft, I was free to make huge, drastic changes without feeling bad. I never had to hit a DELETE key because the old draft was still there. When I typed a new draft I was free to make something new.

Do I want to go back to the old way? Not a chance. I love my CUT and PASTE. If a paragraph fits better up here than it did down there, I no longer need to retype it. I just drag it to where I want it. We’ve gained a lot through technology. But I think we’ve hit the DELETE key on a lot of those old tricks, skills, and strategies.

But there are a couple aspects of writing for which I still use primitive technology. When it comes to planning, there’s nothing like a stack of 3X5 index cards and a kitchen table. I do the brainstorming, I shuffle and organize all the mental dandruff that came out on the cards, and before I know it, I have a plan. I’ve tried computer-based brainstorming and flowcharting tools, and none have worked for me. (If I’ve missed some great tool, please let me in on the secret).

There’s one other writing step that I do without a computer: editing. For me, it’s not even an option. It’s a habit that goes back to my days in Grad School with the Commodore 64. I do my work, I print it out, and I take pen in hand and go to work on it. I’ve killed more trees that way, but they understand. Having a pen in hand—usually a red pen, with an extra blueone to make notes—is part and parcel of the editing process. I remember in the old days, my dot-matrix printer would buzz-buzz-buzz back and forth on the ribbon-feed folded pages until a stack was sitting on the floor. I’d take the whole stack with me to Denny’s. (Here’s a secret, I used to leave the ribbon-feed strips attached because they gave me extra margin space on which to make notes).

I don’t go to Denny’s much anymore. And I haven’t bought ribbon-feed paper for decades. But I still take my printouts with me to a coffee shop and carve away at it with my red pen.

Short Barreled Gunn

Late at night, when my work is done and the rest of the family has gone to bed, I do my best video watching. I’m reviewing a box-set of Inspector Dalgliesh mysteries, based on the P.D. James novels. Those are pretty long movies, six hours apiece or more.

Today a pre-release set of more than a hundred episodes of M Squad arrived. I missed that program the first time around. Oh yeah, I hadn’t been born yet. It starred Lee Marvin as Chicago homicide detective Frank Ballinger. I’m looking forward to watching it, but I have a few more of the Dalgliesh stories to watch.

Last week, having mailed all the Banacek DVDs back to NetFlix (and having not yet received my reviewing assignments) I began watching the first season of Peter Gunn. That was another show from before my time, or at least before I was old enough to be watching crime programs. Man, what a show!

Of course, the Mancini music is great. What I hadn’t realized was just how much music was a part of the program. A majority of the eight episodes on Disc One had jazz club storylines. Craig Stevens was great in the title role of a well-dressed PI (unlicensed?) who spends his free time at Mother’s Bar listening to his girlfriend Edie sing, and helping people out of trouble whenever he can. I hadn’t known that Herschel Bernardi was in every episode as Gunn’s friend Lt. Jacoby. Of those first eight episodes, only one (#6, “The Chinese Hangman”) was a dud. The rest, as one hipster character might say, just groove.

Six Degrees of Trivia

One of the episodes of M Squad depicted a Chicago cop taking a bribe. Mayer Richard Daley took great umbrage at that, and banned film and television production from that city. The ban was finally lifted in 1980 for the filming of The Blues Brothers, in which, among other things, Jake and Elwood’s band played the theme music to Peter Gunn.

See you in seven.