Writing Can Be Tedious Manual Labour

Andy Warhol wanted to be a writer so, in the mid-sixties, he decided to write a novel. Of course he didn’t sit down and write a book – this was Andy Warhol. Instead he carried around a tape recorded when he hung out with Ondine, one of the Factory actors, and the emerging novel is the transcription of those conversation.

Warhol knew this wasn’t how to write a novel but he wanted to do it the wrong way “because doing something the wrong way always opens doors.” He didn’t transcribe the tapes, either. A team of essentially interns did. And some by Mo Tucker, the drummer from The Velvet Underground, although she refused to type out the obscenities. Tucker, by the way, was only able to be in the Velvets because of her typing speed; she would be able sleep in after a show and still make it to her office job in the afternoon to do what counted as a day’s worth of work of a normal typist.

Leaving the transcription to others meant that there were errors. Typing mistakes. Formatting changed. There were misheard words, all things that Warhol would have remembered being said and be able to correct if he was writing it up himself.

Warhol wasn’t interested in that. He didn’t correct the misheard words or the mistakes and errors in the manuscript.

Instead, his philosophy was that this is the process he had decided to use to create this novel and the process produced these mistakes and errors. They were part of the book.

Warhol’s artistic method gave room for this experiment to happen. And he respected the nature of the experiment enough to leave the errors in because it was part of the process. Most books do not have this leeway. Transcribing or writing up handwritten notes is part of the work of writing. It’s not a glamorous part of the work, and it but it is part of the work.

I’m writing a novel at the moment and for this book the process involved writing the first two drafts on a typewriter. Typing up the third draft – what I called the digital draft – was the slowest part of the process so far. It was dull and boring and felt like there was no inspiration, just manual labour but it was essential. There were pieces I could see that would be better shifted about. There was parts I could see should be rewritten immediately, or cut, or merged with another passage.

Dull but essential work. Engaging with it makes the manuscript better and deeper. I’ve just finished the fourth draft, second digital draft, and this was all entirely typed up again. From here, my process is revision but I wouldn’t swap out the effort and experience of writing out the full manuscript no matter how tedious it seemed at times.