If you visit Eudora Welty's house and museum, you can see some of her typewriters. How a writer writes is very important, especially for writers of her generation. Through his business connections, her father could procure quite good typewriters for her for most of her life, both new and secondhand.
When Miss Eudora was writing, there were only three places in Jackson where one could purchase typing paper or legal pads. The Office Supply Company was down the street from her father's office, so I've always amused myself that some of her novels began life as a box of blank typing paper sitting on a shelf in my uncle's store. I even confirmed once that Mr. Welty had an account, although what he purchased was long since lost to history.
Eudora Welty was most likely taught to type in high school. Most women in her generation were, in case they'd have to get a job one day, and typing or teaching was about the only jobs available to most girls. Businesses needed typists too. Every letter, every statement, and every invoice had to be hand typed in the days before computers. One of the reasons banks and insurance companies had such large buildings was to house secretarial pools of typing women.
Faulkner had a typewriter but didn't write with it. He preferred writing longhand so he could see and feel the shape of his words. There weren't many things in Faulkner's life that he treated with love and care, but his words were among them.
When I was a younger man, I traveled to Hollywood in the summers hoping to live there someday. I even gave it a shot a couple of times, but living outside of Mississippi never took hold. In those summers, I made friends with Forrest J Ackerman, the previous editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine and the inventor of Vampirella.
Uncle Forry's life was in the waning years. He'd lost his wife. It'd been many years since his magazine shut down. When he was a magazine editor, Forry was a literary agent for hopeful science fiction writers. His most notorious client was L Ron Hubbard, who wrote very sort of standard Sci-Fi for the fifties. His books were light on science but heavy on post-war social commentary. Most were pretty bad. Forry did not represent Hubbard's book Dianetics, which was an effort to replace psychology, which became Hubbard's obsession and, ultimately, a religious cult.
One day, Forry introduced me to a man at lunch, saying, "This is Ray Bradbury. He writes sometimes."
Ackerman and Bradbury had been childhood friends and were considered co-founders of the Los Angeles Science Fiction Forum. Ackerman had been Bradbury's agent, but after Fahrenheit 451, his publisher demanded Bradbury get a more well-placed agent. Ackerman didn't seem to take offense, and they remained the closest of friends until their very last days.
As a young writer, Bradbury didn't have a typewriter of his own. In the basement of the library, you could put coins in a machine and get an hour's worth of electricity on one of their electric typewriters. Descending with a box of his own paper, Bradbury wrote all of Fahrenheit 451 this way, spending time between pages and looking at the books in the library for inspiration.
Compared to his other novels, there wasn't very much science in Fahrenheit 451, but he hit on cultural memes that resonated deeply in American culture, especially counterculture. After Fahrenheit 451, he was able to afford his own typewriter, an IBM selectric. He'd have other typewriters along the way, but he favored the selectric. Stephen King suggested a word processor for him, which Bradbury got, but never really produced anything of note on it.
Ray Bradbury was who I wanted to be. His advice for young writers was to produce one thousand words a day. In his method of writing, that's slightly less than three pages. You're not really a writer if you don't write. I've been producing between a thousand and two thousand words a day for forty-five years now. At first on my mother's portable typewriter, then later on, different forms of computer word processors. I've only allowed anyone to see what I write for the last two years. That's another story.
The way that Welty, Faulkner, and Bradbury wrote was like making multiple interactions of a carving, making changes and improvements between them, and ultimately only showing the world the final copy. It's a pretty tedious way to write. You end up typing or writing over the same sentence several times. With word processing, there's just one draft that you're constantly massaging and improving.
It's possible that the multiple draft method of writing produces a better result. Typing the same sentence over and over again can make you either commit to it or change it. Most people don't do it. It's time-consuming, and it keeps you from the more interesting part of making new sentences.
I really don't know what my writing will produce. I'd like to think I can produce seven or eight books in the next ten years. I have pretty good writing discipline and can sometimes write things that produce emotion; what remains to be seen is if I can bring all these pieces together into something larger. I love Ray Bradbury, but I've been to his office, and he's not a very organized person. I don't think I can do what he did, but I think I can match his output, maybe even exceed it for a while.
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