My first taste of publication was in 1979, when I had a poem published in the High School Yearbook.  When I was fifteen, I won a regional essay competition, and it was published in the local newspaper.  It was exciting, seeing my name in print and especially knowing that the students at school knew it.

I stopped the dream of writing as a career for several long years.  I would still scribble, map out plots, but rarely finish what I would start.  What I needed was someone to challenge me.  I certainly found it in the Orange Writer’s Group.  Each fortnight we would present a piece of writing to be published in the local paper.

On the way home from Writing Group one afternoon, a fellow writer and I saw an unusual sight.  The fortnight later, as I was relaying the strange sight, the group agreed that everyone would write about it, so we did.  I sent a copy of mine off in an envelope to a magazine (not in print anymore) and received a letter of acceptance three weeks later after I had forgotten about it.  I was inspired.  I sent more submissions, all to no avail.  I envisaged the toilet wall being papered in rejection slips, so stopped.

I had a rest from submitting material until I wrote an article entitled “The Magic of Christmas”.  The editor on the local paper accepted it, and I went from strength to strength.  I now write a weekly column, and have finally finished a manuscript, ready to be published.  However simple it has seemed till now, I am realising the publishing world is bigger than simply AUTHOR + PUBLISHER = READER.  Publishing, the commercial process of putting books and other printed matter into the public domain, belongs to a larger and broader history:

The process of writing began in Mesopotamia, 3rd Millennium BC.  The Babylonians/Assyrians even developed a postal service, complete with clay envelopes, with the first early writing as we know it appeared on stone and copper tablets, the language of Latin being written for the first time on the ‘Black Stone’ of the forum in 3000BC.

By 2nd BC, Egypt refused to supply their rivals with papyrus, so the scribes of Asian Minor had to resort to leather, sheepskin, calfskin or goatskin, although gazelle, antelope and even ostrich skins were used, giving claim to the invention of parchment.  Vellum (Old French: velin) was high quality parchment made by the skins of very young, or even stillborn, animals.  Its principal quality was it didn’t soak up ink or paint, so preserving the original colours better.  Sheets of parchment bound together as the Roman ‘codex’ gave rise to the first ‘book proper’.

Monks were professional calligraphers. And towards the twelfth Century were organising themselves into guilds, or workshops.  They drafted official documents for the new merchant bourgeoisie, and books were written for the exclusive luxury of the nobility and the necessity of the clergy.  The composition of an illuminated letter began with began with the background and figures sketched out in a form of pencil (lead).  The drawing was worked over using ink, before the application of gilding and the insertion of touches of colour, interwoven and underlined with shadow.  At first, the Monks used all the letters of the period: the cursive upper case (also referred to as the ‘unical’), the ‘semi-unical’, a smaller, rounded form, and also the ‘capital’, the square upper case used in monumental inscriptions, all applied with the use of a goose quill, an implement with more potential than the limited reed brush.

In 1539, Robert Estienne compiled a Latin – French dictionary, and in England 1716, William Cason designed a Roman typeface which was used to print the American Declaration of Independence in 1776. 

Paper, produced from a pulp of flax fibres to which water and starch were added, became a major manufacturing business during the thirteenth Century, and with only one or two minor improvements, the method was the same as that of the Chinese in 2AD.  Presses increased production of published material. A type-revolving press invented by Augustus Applegath and Edward Cowper enabled THE TIMES (a thirty-two page paper in 1939) to be printed at a rate of 40 000 copies per hour. Benjamin Day, owner of the New York Sun, issued “Charles O’Malley” in 1840, the first full length novel published in America.

Getting published relies on finished work.  Finished work comes from motivation, the spark that fires your enthusiasm, the encouragement that keeps you persevering.  Ideas are everywhere – in the supermarket, at the bus stop, in the garden.  I recently held a creative writing workshop in the middle of our icy winter and asked for a paragraph on “summer”.  One of the participants wrote about an ant named Joseph whose eyes bulged and head rotated in a state of aggravated manic depression.  She must have thought about picnics first.

Writer’s block is FACT, not merely an excuse for no production of work.  The creativity is blocked and any subject started comes out wooden and rigid.  There is no flow.  A long walk, a cooking session, a phone call to someone – anything to erase all thoughts of what you are trying to create will help.  When the time is right, you’ll write.

The first draft is to get the essence of the subject and to find your voice.  The second to pad it out.  The third to move words around and change paragraphs and phrases.  The fourth to subtract.  Only the author will know when the final draft is, indeed, the final draft. 

Self publishing requires the author to pay for all costs involved without the guaranteed distribution via bookstores.  It also does not provide the excitement of hearing on the other end of the phone line: “Yes, we’re going to run it” or open up the envelope to read “Your story has been accepted for publication and will be published…”

Copyright of any original material has been instantaneous since 1710 when The Statute of Anne was created to protect author’s works and royalties from Writer’s Guilds.  The earliest dispute over copyright was in 55AD between Abbot Finian of Moville and St Columba.  St Colomba copied a Psalter belonging to the Abbot, and the ongoing dispute led to the Battle of Cul Dreimhne, in which three thousand men were killed. 

From the time I received a gold star in second class, to when I received my first typewriter at the age of twelve, I wanted to be a writer.  The smell of a stationer’s store, the freshness of a page of clean paper and the feeling when someone tells you that what you wrote made them feel.  Then you know the joys of being a writer.

 Tania Naven is a NSW writer and journalist.