The Work Habits Of a Hack Novelist

Before the days of word processing, how did authors keep track of their various drafts and revisions? Purple prose writer Jacqueline Susann [Valley of the Dolls, 1966; The Love Machine, 1969; and Once Is Not Enough, 1973] typed each draft on different colors of paper: yellow for the first draft, then blue, pink, and finally white. [It's hard to believe it took four drafts to write such dreadful novels.]

Erin Barrett and Jack Mingo, It Takes a Certain Type To Be A Writer, 2003