Letter 7, 5th March 1934
New Clan
Dorking
5 . III . 34
My dear Bailey,
Allow me to repeat my regrets of this morning, both to you and to
Mrs. Bailey, that the contretemps should have upset a meeting to which both my wife
and myself looked forward. It is, I hope, only deferred. Would you send me a
schedule of your foreseeable dates in and out of Town, to allow of my proposing
another date as soon as these doctors set me free?
There is much to be talked of.
===
About your book, and the stenographer.
If I may venture a word of advice – it is that you should write what you intend, in
any form
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intelligible to yourself, and on any system. And not until you have got it all shaped up
to your own satisfaction, get in a stenographer. Then dictate it to her: and afterwards
let me transcribe it from her shorthand into typing. This will save you having to sit
over her all the time she's typing, to keep her right about how you'd like punctuation,
paragraphing, spelling of unusual names of places and persons, et cetera put into
the typescript. In other words, you can explain or emphasise all these points as you
dictate. The term was “line clear”.
This is mechanism. I've found it a good plan not to use loose sheets of paper
when writing, but a bunch of ordinary lined and margined 2.’ or 3.’ copy books got by
the dozen from Woolworths. Use only the right
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hand side of the copybook, keeping the left for notes, corrections, Interpolations or
jotting down the odds and ends of ideas that will keep cropping up while you're
writing something quite different: and which, if allowed to slide, vanish from memory.
The copybooks being cheap, you can afford to apparently waste space, even when
for page after page the left-hand side has nothing written on it.
Then, on whatever plan you intend to work – chronological, geographical or what
not – organise your ideas into distinct heads: each approaching a chapter or group of
chapters, but keep a separate copybook for each, even if you don't completely fill it.
With regard to the opening chapter – which is always the best if it contains what
these editors
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