Background
How does he work?
He has a small study in his cottage, in which he works each morning. He looks straight out of the window and spends quite a lot of time thinking, getting his ideas together. He begins writing by drafting what he wants to say on rough paper, getting the ideas down as fast as he can. He uses his own form of shorthand and symbols to play around with and order what he’s written. After lunch he uses an old portable typewriter to make sense of and redraft what he wrote in the morning. This is quite labour intensive because he can only type with one finger!
By just getting on with writing, Dick finds that initial ideas can be developed, leading to further thought which might generate more ideas. Dick enjoys trying to compose clever titles for his stories and he prefers to have the title fixed before he begins to write.
Does he plan his stories?
No! Not in the conventional way that people are taught to plan narratives, with a beginning, middle and an end. Dick spends a lot of time thinking about his ideas for a story, and the structure develops naturally from these ideas. He feels that his life has given him ‘plenty of food for thought’ which has ‘filled up his mental larder’, but of course books and all their different narrative structures have been part of his rich and varied life experiences, so knowledge of planning is probably second nature to him.
Having been a teacher, many people assume that Dick wrote stories for his pupils, but in this programme he confesses to writing to entertain himself. He thinks this is quite a good benchmark and his recommendation to would-be writers is primarily:
