To mark the release of The Other Typist paperback edition, debut author, Suzanne Rindell has stopped by to tell us what her inspiration for writing was and how she took on the task of researching her chosen subject, including the history of the typewriter…
A question often put to authors is “What inspired you to write this novel?” I’ve answered this question on many occasions, and I customarily tell the story of how I was meant to be working on an academic dissertation on 1920’s literature but wound up writing a fictional tale set in the 1920’s instead. The story goes: In the course of my academic research I came upon an obituary of a woman who had worked as a typist in a police precinct during America’s Prohibition era. I was fascinated with the sorts of things she might’ve seen at the precinct, and the sorts of reports she might’ve typed up. The wheels in my brain got to turning and my imagination ran away with me.
While I usually go on about my unreliable narrator, Rose, I sometimes forget to elaborate on how studying the history of the typewriter more generally also helped to inspire me. While you mightn’t think it, the typewriter is quite a compelling character in and of itself. The proliferation of the typewriter around the turn of the century was a cultural game-changer, as it meant more and more women were able to enter the workplace. In Rose’s case, she works in a police precinct – a place where women had rarely worked before.
Around the time I came upon the obituary, I also encountered an interesting article in a back-issue of the New Yorker titled “The Typing Life.” In the course of surveying three non-fiction books about the invention of the typewriter the article asserted:
…in the early days the word “typewriter” was used to mean not just the machine but the person plying it. That person, the Remington folks assumed, would be a woman. (The flowers printed on the casing of the early models were to make the mechanism seem friendly to the weaker sex.)
Printing flowers on typewriters to make them more woman-friendly! What a kick, I thought to myself. I was amused by this factoid, in the way you can be amused by the blatant, unabashed sexism of commercial advertising. Then my eyes were drawn back to the sentences that had preceded this flower-printing gem of trivia. It read:
In the beginning, few people imagined that anyone would compose at the machine. The user of the typewriter would be an amanuensis—in other words, a secretary—taking dictation from another person.
These two notions – that the typewriter was meant solely as an instrument of (presumably accurate) dictation, and that women were meant to operate the typewriter – began to dance about in my head. What if my narrator Rose was assumed to be a passive woman, entrusted to take dictation and transcribe reports, but turned out to be an extremely biased, unbalanced individual? The things she could do and the trouble she might wield with her typewriter presented itself as a potentially juicy story, and I was off and running with the novel’s plot.
In the end, the typewriter played a kind of a lynchpin role in the creation of my novel. It brought Rose into the police precinct, and it enabled her – an otherwise powerless secretary – to wreck havoc over the systems we rely upon to produce objective legal justice.
After reading the obituary and the New Yorker article, I knew something had sparked, and as a writer, I felt the exciting prickle of inspiration. I knew that within the typewriter a story was waiting for me, in more ways than one.
New Yorker article: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/04/09/070409crbo_books_acocella?printable=true¤tPage=all#ixzz2ocHVhNvg
Many thanks to Suzanne for this fantastic piece.
I am very much looking forward to getting my hands on a copy of this novel, their is already a lot of chatter amongst the book community about this stunning dark and mysterious tale.
The book is out NOW and you can grab your copy here.
For more exciting and exclusive pieces from excerpts to interviews, check out the other stops on the tour!
January 16th- NOVELICIOUS
January 17th- THE BOOKBAG
January 18th- RAVEN CRIME READS
January 19th- LEELEE LOVES
January 20th- READING IN THE SUNSHINE
