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Authors: Anne R. Dick
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FOUR
“One of the sheep had a lamb!” Bonnie shouted, as he got out of the car. “She had a lamb just a couple of minutes ago!”
“We saw it through the window!” Elsie shouted at him. “The Bluebirds saw it; we were baking bread and we saw four black feet and I said, ‘Look there’s a lamb,’ and it was. Mommy said it’s a female lamb, it’s a girl lamb. They’re out in back on the patio looking at it.” The girls skipped and raced along beside him as he went through the house and opened the back door to the patio.
—Philip K. Dick,
Confessions of a Crap Artist
P HIL TOLD ME , “The function of the writer as a chronicler is very important. The chronicler creates the culture he writes about. A culture without a chronicler doesn’t exist.” He was a fluent writer, and his work came easily to him. He said that the idea for a novel came to him in one intuitive flash, but he couldn’t tell it “in under sixty thousand words. The words come out of my hands, not my brain. I write with my hands. I type 160 words a minute, the rate of a really good legal secretary, and I’m accurate.” One day he told me that he had typed sixty original manuscript pages without an error.
I learned with surprise when I interviewed Phil’s friends Jerry and June Kresy, and Lois Mini after his death that back in the sixties, Phil was telling them that he felt pressured by me to write, and was exhausted from working so hard. He never said anything like this to me or showed any signs of fatigue. He seemed to love his work. He set his own schedule and the rate at which he worked was completely up to him. He actually didn’t write as much as during the years he lived in Berkeley. I would have never dreamed of telling him how he should work, or how much he should do, except that I wanted him home in time for dinner
.
Phil’s plan was to write two novels a year, spending three months on each. During the three months between he would think about his next novel. The first draft of a novel took him six weeks to write and six weeks to revise. (Later in his life, he once wrote a novel over a long weekend.) In between novels, Phil worked in the garden, read, and listened to music. He didn’t take many notes. His memory was so good he didn’t need to. Very occasionally, at 3 a.m., he would switch on the bedside lamp and write a few sentences in a small notebook. When I first saw him sitting in the big armchair in the living room in the middle of the day looking vague, I asked him, “What are you doing?”
He replied in a very definite and slightly annoyed tone of voice, “I’m working.”
I tiptoed away.
Some days, he’d take a chair outside and sit under the walnut trees for an hour gazing at Black Mountain. He hated being interrupted. “Beware of the person from Porlock,” he told me, and recounted the tale of how Coleridge had been interrupted as he was writing the most perfect poem in the English language, “Kubla Khan,” by someone knocking at the door and asking, “Can you tell me the way to Porlock?” He discouraged friends or neighbors from dropping in and could be quite rude if someone unexpectedly came to our door.
After he finished a first draft he liked to do all his own rewriting. His first drafts were virtually complete and needed such a small amount of revision that I suggested that he hire a typist for his second draft and use his energy for creative work. He wouldn’t hear of this “I don’t want anyone else to touch my manuscript.”
Phil had an enormous store of recondite knowledge. He skimmed through research books quickly, picking up the main theme and remembering everything. He didn’t read much but he browsed a lot. He loved his never-updated
Encyclopedia Britannica
, which he had bought as a teenager. When he wrote, he blended together a complex network of disparate parts. His talent for mimicry created dialogue that brings the people we knew in the early sixties back to vivid life
“One of the sheep had a lamb!” Bonnie shouted, as he got out of the car. “She had a lamb just a couple of minutes ago!”
“We saw it through the window!” Elsie shouted at him. “The Bluebirds saw it; we were baking bread and we saw four black feet and I said, ‘Look there’s a lamb,’ and it was. Mommy said it’s a female lamb, it’s a girl lamb. They’re out in back on the patio looking at it.” The girls skipped and raced along beside him as he went through the house and opened the back door to the patio.
—Philip K. Dick,
Confessions of a Crap Artist
P HIL TOLD ME , “The function of the writer as a chronicler is very important. The chronicler creates the culture he writes about. A culture without a chronicler doesn’t exist.” He was a fluent writer, and his work came easily to him. He said that the idea for a novel came to him in one intuitive flash, but he couldn’t tell it “in under sixty thousand words. The words come out of my hands, not my brain. I write with my hands. I type 160 words a minute, the rate of a really good legal secretary, and I’m accurate.” One day he told me that he had typed sixty original manuscript pages without an error.
I learned with surprise when I interviewed Phil’s friends Jerry and June Kresy, and Lois Mini after his death that back in the sixties, Phil was telling them that he felt pressured by me to write, and was exhausted from working so hard. He never said anything like this to me or showed any signs of fatigue. He seemed to love his work. He set his own schedule and the rate at which he worked was completely up to him. He actually didn’t write as much as during the years he lived in Berkeley. I would have never dreamed of telling him how he should work, or how much he should do, except that I wanted him home in time for dinner
.
Phil’s plan was to write two novels a year, spending three months on each. During the three months between he would think about his next novel. The first draft of a novel took him six weeks to write and six weeks to revise. (Later in his life, he once wrote a novel over a long weekend.) In between novels, Phil worked in the garden, read, and listened to music. He didn’t take many notes. His memory was so good he didn’t need to. Very occasionally, at 3 a.m., he would switch on the bedside lamp and write a few sentences in a small notebook. When I first saw him sitting in the big armchair in the living room in the middle of the day looking vague, I asked him, “What are you doing?”
He replied in a very definite and slightly annoyed tone of voice, “I’m working.”
I tiptoed away.
Some days, he’d take a chair outside and sit under the walnut trees for an hour gazing at Black Mountain. He hated being interrupted. “Beware of the person from Porlock,” he told me, and recounted the tale of how Coleridge had been interrupted as he was writing the most perfect poem in the English language, “Kubla Khan,” by someone knocking at the door and asking, “Can you tell me the way to Porlock?” He discouraged friends or neighbors from dropping in and could be quite rude if someone unexpectedly came to our door.
After he finished a first draft he liked to do all his own rewriting. His first drafts were virtually complete and needed such a small amount of revision that I suggested that he hire a typist for his second draft and use his energy for creative work. He wouldn’t hear of this “I don’t want anyone else to touch my manuscript.”
Phil had an enormous store of recondite knowledge. He skimmed through research books quickly, picking up the main theme and remembering everything. He didn’t read much but he browsed a lot. He loved his never-updated
Encyclopedia Britannica
, which he had bought as a teenager. When he wrote, he blended together a complex network of disparate parts. His talent for mimicry created dialogue that brings the people we knew in the early sixties back to vivid life
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