Life magazine has posted a trove of photographs of Vladimir Nabokov in 1959, a year after the first U.S. publication of Lolita. From the photo captions:
Nabokov wrote most of his novels on 3″ x 5″ notecards, keeping blank cards under his pillow for whenever inspiration struck. Seen here: a draft of Lolita.… Near the end of writing Lolita, Nabokov became dissatisfied with the work and tried to burn his notecards. Vera [his wife] stopped him.
Its fascinating to see how other writers get the work done, isn’t it. More please, William.
I find it fascinating, too. What’s amazing to me is the variety of work habits among great writers. I had hoped that by analyzing the habits of my betters, I could find the key, the One True Way. No such luck.
I wonder if you would eventually become a slave to this way of writing. It must influence the rythmn of writing. I suppose the flip side of that is the freedom to take it in new directions, rather than risk getting trapped in something that evolves in a more linear way. Must try it.
It seemed to me that Nabokov was improvising a method that gave him some of the flexibility of a modern word processor — the ability to cut and paste, to move text around easily. It reminds me of Scrivener, a little: lots of small chunks of text that are strung together to create the manuscript. The only downside is that poor Vera had to type her husband’s manuscripts, which he would dictate from these cards. There was no computer to compile all those small chunks automatically, as Scrivener does. But then, maybe even that was a good thing: Nabokov must have gotten a good sense of his novel in that final step, when he dictated the entire thing aloud while his wife typed.