Function Shapes Form - Writing Noir on a Typewriter

I wrote the first story in my new collection - Anna Voss Writes the Classics - on a typewriter.

Not my usual slightly rubbish old laptop (portable, forgiving, endlessly deletable, and also a little harder to justify not writing on, if you can avoid procrastinating), but an actual typewriter. A 1960s Adler, German steel, found in a charity shop and bought half as a joke, half because of a future project set in the cold war. 

She’s heavy, her ribbon smears everywhere, and the keys need way more effort than you could imagine: I'm a pretty slick typist in real life (or at least on a computer); the Adler is a real bitch - she cuts my speed in half at least! And she has no delete function, just a backspace which does nothing but show you the mistake you just made. Once she's shown you, she lets you choose if you're going to live with it, retype that whole line using the Red Ribbon Of Shame, or just start the entire page again. 

If I write, in future, a mercilessly strict Domme called Mistress Adler, you'll know where I got the idea... 

But here’s the strange part: unforgiving though she is, I grew to love her, and she changed how I wrote.

The first story in the book, Farewell, My Pleasure, is a Chandler-inspired noir about a PI named Vic Webster who finds himself hired into a case involving sisters, inheritances, and a chastity device. Chandler himself worked on a typewriter - Remington, I think, confusingly the same Remington as made guns for cowboys - and he hated it. I can see why: they make you lazy in one way and diligent in another.

The diligence, I covered: you have to get it right first time. (Or get it wrong, rip the page out, and go nuts with a biro, that works too) 

But as for laziness...I noticed halfway through drafting that Vic’s speeches were running long. So were Nicola's. Not because I thought Chandler needed the space (though he often did), but simply because, if the little bell hadn't rung to warn me I was running out of line, I couldn’t be bothered to yank the carriage back. 

Every carriage return meant wasting half a line of paper and inching closer to the fiddly process of feeding in a new sheet and trying to stop it going crooked. My Adler has a special lever to fix it when it's crooked (if you notice in time...) but that's even slower! If I could avoid carriage returns, I avoided them - so I let speeches run, let monologues roll, and only broke them up later when I typed the draft clean.

The result of that was a kind of unstoppable, slightly baggy rhythm; I didn't like to write too many bits of dialogue where one person stops with a "she said, stretching dangerously". 

...just to start a fresh line down here with no purpose but to say, basically, "I see". 

...and then go back to the first speaker here. 

(Genuinely, even doing that here, on the blog, with all the enter keys I can eat, felt a bit stressful!) 

And funnily enough, that odd, baggy, slightly-monologuing dialogue is pretty much what Chandler’s detectives sound like: wisecracks that keep circling until they land somewhere between poetry and exhaustion.

That was a fascinating discovery: the tool shaped the voice as much as the writer did.

Chandler had his Remington, Austen her quills, Chaucer his manuscripts. They all wrote under constraints. And I found myself doing the same - with one major exception. They all wrote under one constraint I deliberately set out to avoid: their societies didn't let good authors write femdom. 

That brings me to this collection as a whole. Anna Voss Writes the Classics is me setting myself a challenge:

Could I write femdom orgasm-denial fiction in the style of Chaucer, Austen, Saki, and Chandler?(Spoilers: I absolutely can. Time machines won't save you, boys!) 

Could they have written it, if their societies had allowed them? (They definitely could have!) 

And doesn’t the fact it can be done prove something important - that femdom has always been there, waiting to be written down? (Yes. Always.) 

That last one matters to me. I’ve been around long enough to know men cry with gratitude when they find a partner who’s into this. Sometimes, yes, they cry later because their balls are bluer than they ever thought possible - but that’s part of the fun. 

The point I wanted to make is this: this isn’t new. It’s not a 21st-century kink plucked from the ether. It’s as old as Chaucer’s fabliaux and as sharp as Austen’s wit.

(And yes, the book is still hot. It’s still smut. Don’t worry!) 

To circle back to Chandler for a moment: I read a stack of him while writing Farewell, My Pleasure, so here's my pro tip for anyone tempted to imitate him: absolutely, go wild with the metaphors, but don’t use them all the time. Keep a mix of classical references in there, not just bars and violence (his gumshoes are smart, as well as noble and cynical), and just remember not every sentence has to be a simile, never mind what the parodies on TV suggest: using too many similies wastes paper! 

“She had legs for days and a smile that could crack glass”... fine.

“She had legs for days and a smile that could crack glass, and she walked in like she owned the joint: I was starting to feel like nineteen monkeys had danced a quickstep on my skull and I felt as hungover as a priest on Monday”... too much. Far too much. Remember: keep it punchy, or you'll need another sheet! 

(Although “hungover as a priest on Monday” is good. You can have that one on me.)

So here we are. A book that started with me hammering out smut on a typewriter, ribbon stains on the carpet, cat underfoot, whisky close at hand. A book that let me slip femdom into the registers of some of the greats, and discover that it fits... It fits all too well.

If that sounds a little bit too much like homework, you can always enjoy my The Ruritanian Pretender, which is loosely in the style - at least, the genre! - of Anthony Hope, but I promise this new collection of shorter tales has something for everyone: I even tried my hand a cuckold porn, and it's entirely Geoffrey Chaucer's fault. 

Anna Voss Writes the Classics is out now. Explore femdom as if had been written by the authors you've only read about: Chaucer to Chandler, Austen to Saki, with Shakespeare laced through the middle. 

Because every age had dominant women - we just never wrote them down.