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Concealing the Creative Process
By Joseph Janes
American Libraries Columnist
Assistant Professor, Information School, University of Washington.
intlib@ischool.washington.edu
Column for February 2005
Dorothy Kilgallen led an extraordinary life. A gossip columnist as well as a journalist instrumental in Sam Sheppard’s eventual acquittal (she revealed the judge’s private pretrial opinion that Sheppard was “guilty as hell”), she became fascinated with the JFK assassination after a personal interview with Jack Ruby. Her death, labeled suicide, is still controversial (google “Kilgallen suicide conspiracy”).
Kilgallen is probably best known for her many years as a panelist on the game show What’s My Line? But each new chapter of Lee Israel’s 1979 biography Kilgallen brings new revelations in a life I knew not very much about. Imagine my additional surprise when I found a bookplate in our library’s copy that read: “Gift of Kitty Kelley, UW Class of 1964.” Yes, that Kitty Kelley, she of the celebrity biographies.
(Why am I reading Dorothy Kilgallen’s biography? Short version: lifelong game-show addict, nightly reruns of What’s My Line? on Game Show Network, interest in her columns, finding we owned the biography. . . . Connect the dots.)
Then, after reading about half the book, the handful of red marks I found started to make sense. No marginalia, just thick marker underlines in a few margins and a couple of index listings. I figured out they were all passages referring to Frank Sinatra and his relationship, contentious and occasionally downright nasty, with Kilgallen. Furthermore, chapter 22, in which Sinatra features prominently (along with Kilgallen’s affair with the singer Johnnie Ray—who knew?), was crimped on the edge, as though it had been folded over for later retrieval.
Fascinating. I believe I gained a small insight into the way Kitty Kelley researched one of her books. I inferred that she got this book while researching her 1986 Sinatra biography and mined it: a few quick red flashes on the page, a chapter folded over.
Celebrity necrophilia aside, this reminded me of a recent class discussion about the long-term viability and stability of digital work. I wouldn’t quite put these red marks up with the Thomas Jefferson marginalia I saw at LC or the holograph of the manuscript of Water Music on display at the British Library; but they are all artifacts that help us better understand the creative process at work. Be it Handel, Kelley, or Jefferson, they all left a mark, both in their work and in the way they did their work.
Those marks are still available to us because of the physical nature of the artifacts they used or produced. Drafts of letters, diaries, edits and revisions of chapters and sonnets, last-minute cuts from the War of the Worlds radio broadcast—all of these help us see the creative process.
Thought and creativity continue, but the ways in which they are carried out are changed. The vast majority of information is born digital today, and as a result, there are usually fewer if any physical intermediate artifacts; instead, edits are made within word-processing or image or sound files. Rather than literally cutting and pasting sections of documents, it’s done with keystrokes and clicks. And thus the process is lost.
This effect is magnified in the internet world. When was the last time you wrote a draft of an e-mail and then printed it out to fuss over it and perfect it? Other than the occasional earlier copy in the Internet Archive, where are the transitional versions of web pages?
The Web is all about process; for that matter, the Web is a process. Web pages can change weekly, daily, hourly, constantly; and it’s reasonable to assume that many pages never reach final form, that they’re only drafts that evaporate with each succeeding version. So the story of the Web’s evolution may never be fully told, because the edits and marginalia will never be captured.
A global oral history
With little external, saved documentation, any record that exists is accidental and unpredictable and spotty and rare. The Web is curiously like The Iliad, like an oral tradition passed down from (rapidly accelerating) generation to generation, and only the most recent version survives. It won’t ever solidify as oral traditions can; it likely goes on, continually changing in the retelling, a global oral history without finish.
For the record, there’s a shoebox in my home office with all my handwritten notes and corrected drafts of these columns, for some poor future soul to excavate some day. I have, however, recently begun using a digital video recorder to “write” my first drafts, and I’m certainly not saving those recordings . . . but that’s another story.
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