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The Evolving Archaeology of the Novel

By amy ross. Filed in authors, writing  |  
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So this morning I followed a series of links around the internet about John Updike’s archive, and what may or may not be gleaned from it.

That question aside, a lot of people are pointing out that this whole concept of a writer’s archive of materials is becoming obsolete in the digital age. Says Adam Begley in the nytimes, “Updike’s archive may be the last great paper trail… Anyone interested in how a great writer works will find here as full an explanation as we’re likely to get.”

Ruth Franklin further comments in The New Republic that “the computer discourages the keeping of archives, at least in their traditional form. If Updike had been working in Word, he might have left no trace of the numerous emendations to the opening airport scene of Rabbit at Rest.”

Mark Athitakis then follows up by suggesting that in the future, writer’s archive’s might consist of their twitter posts and facebook “likes”.

This seems like an excessively grim prediction. The idea that technology has obscured the “trace” of the working writer is baffling to me. Why should the fact of working in Word mean that writers don’t save their drafts, false starts, and excisions?

I can only speak of my own process, but for this most recent book alone, I have accumulated:

  • Two notebooks (yes, real paper) worth of outlining, character sketches, problem-solving, etc.
  • A folder full of photos I took to help me visualize the clothing and living spaces of my characters
  • A file of links to articles and images from around the web that spurred bits and pieces of my story.  And perhaps most strikingly,
  • 123 individual files, including drafts at all stages, notes, dead-ended experiments, lists of words, ideas, concepts, places, and chunks of history I wanted to incorporate into the text, comments from critique partners, drafts of query letters, ever line I ever cut from the book but thought I might want to re-use later (I revive dead snippets all the time), paragraphs from other books I want to refer to for inspiration, lists of songs I found relevant while writing, excel sheets tracking character and theme development, and God only knows what other detritus.

And this is to say nothing of the vast number of emails, forum posts, and online journal entries I have racked up in the name of this enterprise. Egotist that I am, even I can’t imagine that any biographer would ever be compelled to sort through it all. And this is all for only one book!

I know not all writers work this way. I have some (very successful) friends who simply open up a fresh document, start writing, and from then on all their work is done in that one file, so there is indeed no record of their process. But even before computers, there were writers who burned their early drafts, or trashed all their notes the minute the book was sold.  Has so much really changed?  I’d say that the biggest change is that at least an electronic archive can be searched for relevant details as easily as hitting Ctrl+F.

How about you? When you’re famous and dead, will you have left anything behind for students of your work to sift through?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 30th, 2010 at 11:40 am and is filed under authors, writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

18 Comments

  1. Comment by cat hellisen:
    Wednesday, June 30th 2010 at 11:54 am | 

    Wow. Just wow.

    I had no idea you went into that kind of hectic depth with your stuff. I’m kinda scared, ngl.

    Scared and impressed.

  2. Comment by elissa janine:
    Wednesday, June 30th 2010 at 12:08 pm | 

    haha I’ll comment on the content later, but I’m laughing about your tags right now.

    • Comment by cat hellisen:
      Wednesday, June 30th 2010 at 12:11 pm | 

      Lol, now I went to look at the tags.

    • Comment by amy ross:
      Wednesday, June 30th 2010 at 12:15 pm | 

      srsly though, I’m starting to wonder why I bother. I spend a stupid amount of time wondering if “archives” is an adequate tag, or if “archive” or “archiving” might be more popular, or “literary archiving” more useful, or if anyone even looks at these things.

      • Comment by cat hellisen:
        Wednesday, June 30th 2010 at 12:38 pm | 

        I used to tag, because I do find them convenient on other people’s blogs when i’m looking for similar content (like say I want all the info on that person’s agent – a tag like “agent” certainly makes stalking easier), but i’ve mostly given up with tagging my own entries because Blah.

  3. Comment by Andy:
    Wednesday, June 30th 2010 at 12:09 pm | 

    Interesting post!

    I definitely do not think that the age of the paper trail for writers is over. Like you’ve said, there have always been those who burned or destroyed their notes and drafts and outlines, and I’m sure there were those who wrote/typed out just a few drafts while keeping all notes by memory. But there are definitely people out there who still keep paper notes, or the electronic equivalent (beyond tweets and ‘likes’).

    Honestly, I’m impressed by your note/record keeping! Especially the collection of photos, which I never really considered in a hard copy format.

    For my currently untitled WIP, all of my notes are, strangely, kept in a single notepad document. There are currently two drafts of the book, in two files, and one extra early draft. I also have a few pictures saved from a photography website of models who look like my characters, for easier visualization. I think this is my first book to have solely electronic evidence, and even so these items could be printed and used for any biography someone might write in the future (I wish! haha).

    Another trunked work of mine is much more representative of my usual process. Checking its folder on my computer tells me that there are 63 files concerning the novel, from drafts to notes to agent queries. Beyond this, there are dozens of post-it notes around my house with small details, names, etc. There are also at least two notebooks with outlining information, notes, and handwritten chapters. All of this together doesn’t amount to what you have, but since this sort of process is common for all of my works (save for the current one) I think it’s safe to assume that any biographer would have more than enough paper material.

    Maybe you and I are both outliers in this, but I would think not. Even if authors’ notes and paper trails are confined to electronic forms in this age, I definitely don’t think there’s any sort of void of backlogged material, false starts, outlines, random musings, and more for many writers. Maybe I’m being optimistic in believing this, holding onto the notion that paper is still very relevant in this day and age, but I think these things will stick around for some time, if not forever.

    • Comment by amy ross:
      Wednesday, June 30th 2010 at 12:20 pm | 

      random musings, eh? ;)

      yeah, I didn’t count my post-it notes, because I’m pretty sure I’m going to toss those. Plus I basically transfered them all to e-docs. Oh, and I should clarify! My photos are all in a set on flickr, not hard copies. lol, I haven’t even handled a hard copy of a photo in ages.

      I think this is my first book to have solely electronic evidence, and even so these items could be printed and used for any biography someone might write in the future (I wish! haha).

      I think this is an interesting comment. Would people necessarily need to print them out? It seems like, since we’re imagining a hypothetical future in which we have biographers, why not imagine a world in which electronic documents become electronic biographies without ever passing through the paper phase?

      • Comment by Andy:
        Wednesday, June 30th 2010 at 12:23 pm | 

        Good point! I guess there wouldn’t be any reason to print them out, since everything could be transfered from my PC to my hypothetical biographer’s.

        In reality, electronic note-keeping should make biographying easier than ever.

        (Also, I never throw away post-its. I keep them all. It’s kind of a problem.)

  4. Comment by hannah:
    Wednesday, June 30th 2010 at 12:27 pm | 

    Obviously I’m more on the “one document” side of the line, but I do save a new version every month, mostly just so it’s easiest to find the most recent document. I figured this out after I would save drafts in different stages under the same title, or I’d save things as “INVINCIBLE SUMMER–ANICA EDIT” and “INVINCIBLE SUMMER–FINAL DRAFT” and be like uh, what, awesome.

    So now, every month I work on something, I change it to like “FISHBOY–MAY 2010″ or “FISHBOY–JUNE 2010″ which makes it way easier to track down the most recent version of the book. But I do also like that I can go back to an older version. Obviously I’m not saving everything this way, just the finishing point of each month, but it still means I can go back to an older version if I need to, though I admit I never have.

  5. Comment by elissa janine:
    Wednesday, June 30th 2010 at 1:03 pm | 

    I have just counted: KtMS folder has 87 files, and my “NOTES AND STUFF” file is basically a bunch of stuff just like you’ve mentioned. In addition, I have two paper notebooks full of plotting and characterization notes and ideas PLUS another full notebook of my personal notes that I took while reading THE DHARMA BUMS and Kerouac haiku. OH! also my journals from long ago and far away when I took my road trip through the same geography…I lifted some things straight from there! um, and a typed printout of the original character sketch, which I somehow managed to get off of my old word processor floppy disk. I don’t even remember how I did that, lol.

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