The Write Stuff

ORLEAN: I remember there was a -typewriter-repair shop on Amsterdam and 79th. It just kept getting smaller and smaller and then it turned into a luggage shop.

STROUT: And those people were so lovely. I mean, not the people in that particular shop, but -typewriter--repair people. You had this relationship with them, because they were saving you.

ANDERSEN: Speaking of antiquarian tinge! I can't even write letters at this point. I can't write anything longer than three sentences by hand. I was so happy to give up the typewriter.

CARO: The whole world today believes that speed is a good. But maybe writing is something in which slowing yourself down isn't bad. The reason I write my first drafts in longhand is that when I went to Princeton and I took creative-writing courses, my professor was this teacher named R. P. Blackmur, who was a great critic. So you had to hand in a short story every two weeks, and I could always do it starting at midnight the night before. I got pretty good marks, and I thought I was really fooling him. Then my senior year, in what I remember was one of my last sessions with him, he looked me in the eye, handed me my story, and said, "Mr. Caro, you're never going to be what you want to be unless you learn to stop thinking with your fingers." And I understood exactly. When I wrote my first book, I remembered what Blackmur said, and I said to myself, I must slow myself down. And the way I did was to write in longhand.

ANDERSEN: To me it's not about speed at all. The hours per page at this table is probably the same. But to me it's having a way to have the speed of the process more conformed to what I perceive to be the speed of my brain, and essentially to be able to do 50 drafts of a paragraph or a sentence in 20 minutes rather than what feels like writing the Declaration of Independence if I were writing it by hand.

BLOCK: When I was first starting out, there were things with the typewriter, a certain tyranny. I remember one time I was -writing—I was working at a very low level, let it be said—and I had done what I thought was a 20-page chapter that day. The pages were numbered from page 21 to page 40. I was reading it through and discovered I had left out page 39. I had written page 38 and the next page continued in the middle of a sentence and it was page 40. I didn't want to retype and renumber and everything, so I wrote page 39 to fit. [Laughter]

To what extent is the rise of E-readers going to change what you do, and how do you think the paying-the-rent part of the business is going to develop?
ANDERSEN: [To Gordon-Reed] You have tenure—you don't need to talk about this. [Laughter]

ORLEAN: I don't understand the great fear of e-readers. Maybe I'm missing something, but I think you can look at iPods and music and, you know, it was a shift to a different form that I actually think encourages people buying more music, because you don't have to build yet another shelf in your house to have those CDs.

ANDERSEN: Also it will no longer enable people to have books on their shelves as signifiers of how smart they are. There's no reason to download a book unless you intend to read it. There's no need to show off.

BLOCK: I don't think anybody really expects e-books to supplant printed books, because I don't think that they're ever going to be that much more enjoyable a way to read a book. It was different with downloads and iPods; that's a better way to hear music than a CD is. I think that what e-books will do is enable people to carry a few hundred books with them on a trip rather than struggling with a suitcase to take five along. But I don't think it will be the same transformative thing that audible downloads have been.

ORLEAN: I'm not totally sure. Somebody made this analogy, which I think is extreme, but when cars were developed, people began keeping horses for pets, or if they were really beautiful, they had a beautiful horse for the sake of having a beautiful horse, but they drove a car. I think you're going to continue buying very visual books, or you may give them as gifts.

ANDERSEN: There's something slightly sad and elegiac about the idea of books disappearing, which I agree that they will, or losing the experience that I have walking into your house and immediately seeing the jacket of my book on your bookshelf.