In the Deadlands Read Free Page A

I am still very proud of—if not for the execution, then certainly for the ambition.
    Writers worth reading do not spring full blown from their own foreheads like Athena from the forehead of Zeus. They start out as voracious readers, devouring every book in their path. After a thousand or so books and stories, maybe ten thousand in the case of slow learners, you start to notice the difference between a fun read and a tiresome one. (I will not name the author who so consistently disappointed me in my teens that I began to associate his name withbooks-worthy-of-being-skipped. He is mostly forgotten today, but I’m grateful for his existence. He became my personal good example of how not to write.)
    I think that’s the critical lesson.
    When you can tell the difference between effective and clumsy in others, then you can start to see it in your own work. If you’re too damn stubborn to quit, you start to learn how to rewrite.
    I had one advantage—a slight case of OCD. I wanted every page to have a perfect appearance. No erasures, no strikeouts, no penciled-in additions, no half pages. I wanted the whole manuscript to be spotless. I wanted accurate punctuation and flawless grammar. I wanted precise black type on a pristine white surface. I wanted perfect margins and accurate page numbering. I wanted my manuscripts to be easy to read. I wanted them to be professional.
    Other teenagers bought cars. I bought a typewriter. But what a typewriter!—a fabled ecstasy of a machine, from the kingdom of electrical magic, a desktop sports car, easily capable of 120 words per minute on the straightaway. An IBM Selectric! The keyboard had a sublime chaketa-chaketa-click that was the mechanical equivalent of an orgasm. Above, an infuriated golf-ball raced back and forth across the page, leaving a crisp trail of words on the clean white paper, looking as if they had been professionally printed. That pristine clarity demanded respect—it demanded equal precision in the language. It demanded eloquence.
    There was an actual physical joy in the clickety-clickety-clack of the keys on that anvil-heavy machine, feeling the words occur in real time. Sometimes I typed for the sheer joy of typing, not knowing where the words were leading, finding out where I had arrived only when the journey ended. It was like conducting a personal orchestra. Sometimes, caught up in themagic of the moment—with Beethoven or the Beatles filling the room—I felt as if I was playing a joyous blues-riff on an infinite piano. (Additional purple prose removed here.)
    So if a page needed correction, retyping wasn’t a chore.
    I’d retype a whole page just to fix one broken sentence. I’d go back and retype ten pages if necessary, repairing an awkward paragraph and then fixing everything that followed so I would have only clean pages—and every time I retyped, I rewrote . I would see what was missing and I’d add it. I’d see what was unnecessary and I’d cut it. I’d see what was clumsy and I’d change it. I’d see where thoughts were out of order and move whole paragraphs, whole sections. And sometimes I’d even see what was effective—and I’d leave it alone.
    That little bit of OCD compelled me to learn, forced me to reexamine every sentence more than once, pushed me toward a better understanding of the limits of language as well as its power to evoke.
    Today, I use a computer. (I know a few authors who don’t.) But all these years later, I still miss the clickety-clackety-clatter of the Selectric. It made typing a physically satisfying experience, but I don’t miss having to retype multiple pages to achieve a handsome-looking manuscript. The computer easily generates better pages than I could ever do by hand.
    But the ease with which the computer allows a person to pour words onto the screen is also a trap. A quick stroll through the comment section on any web page reveals how