Dean Koontz is listed by Forbes as one of America’s
best-selling authors, with reported annual sales of over $24 million. Koontz
has had fourteen titles on the New York Times bestseller list, with his work at
the top of the list four times
It wasn’t easy for him though, as he says, ‘I
sold the first short story I wrote. Then I received over seventy-five
rejections before making another sale. My first four novels were never
published. Later, after I’d been selling genre fiction routinely, I wrote a
mainstream novel and editors sent me enthusiastic letters about it but turned
it down because they felt it was too disturbing and avant-garde to be
commercial.’
Undaunted, Koontz decided that writing novels was the only
work he wanted to do and put in sixty-hour weeks at his typewriter, developing
his well proven novel format. When he finished his first New York Times best-seller, Whispers,
his wife pointed out that for every page in the final manuscript, he’d used
thirty-two pages of typing paper, laboriously re-typing eight hundred pages of
text over and over before he was satisfied.
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| IBM Displaywriter |
An obsessive re-writer, Koontz decided to invest in one of
the expensive new word processors, the IBM Displaywriter, storing his work on
massive eight inch floppy disks and printing out the pages on a daisywheel
printer. He still worked for ten hours
at a time but was now able to revise his work on screen, rather
than waste time re-typing.
He was
pleased if he managed half a dozen finished pages a day, and said, ‘The secret
is doing it day after day, committing to it and avoiding distractions. A month goes
by and, as a slow drip of water can fill a huge cauldron in a month, so you
discover that you have seventy-five polished pages.’
For somebody who's just started out - finished a first novel - reading this is most useful. Thankyou!
ReplyDeleteThanks - and I'm glad we don't have to rely on typewriters!
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