Dickinson, Peter, 1934-

Created by Peter Dickinson during the course of his career as a writer, from the 1960s to 2004.

The following explanatory notes were supplied by Peter Dickinson to provide further information and explanation on the context of creation:

'1.) Editors. The documents in the catalogue tend to distort my relationship with my various editors, partly because before the coming of e-mail it was always simpler to telephone London than it was Boston or New York, and until the late 1980s I actually did most of my writing in London, and even in the 1990s we kept a London flat. Indeed for a few years it was only a few doors away from where my Macmillan editor, Marion Lloyd, lived. So, for instance, in my early years as a writer Joanna Goldsworthy at Gollancz was fully as important to me as Emilie Macleod at Atlantic, but I spoke to or saw Joanna fairly frequently, whereas I think I met Emilie only four or five times in the time we worked together, so the only way to maintain the personal relationship with her was in writing. Inevitably the documents will make it seem more intense than the workmanlike friendship with Joanna. Until the coming of e-mail the same applies to most of my other pairs of editors.

I have always encouraged my editors in the two countries to work together with me and arrive at an agreed text (apart from the standard Americanisations of vocabulary and spelling, and the occasional clarification of something peculiarly English.) The most notable example of this was the concentrated three-way involvement of Wendy Lamb and Judy Donnelly and myself in the editing of The Kin. In the end I came to feel that they knew the book better than I did. Little of this is reflected in the documents. And since the coming of e-mail I and my two editors have always copied everything to the other two.

2.) Manuscripts. The catalogue refers to some MSS as having amendments sellotaped into them. These are what I regarded at the time as final drafts, in the days when I still wrote on a typewriter. My handwriting was never very legible and has got worse over the years. Almost all my books in those days were written straight through as a single draft. If I had changed my mind about something, unless it required very substantial alteration, I would leaf back and make a note at the relevant passage and then carry on as though the change had been already made. I then rewrote the book from beginning to end and sent it via my agents for the editors to look at, hoping to get it back with no more than a few tinkerings to deal with. If these involved only a few lines I would type the new version and tape it in. Anything longer I'd type on a separate sheet and mark the MS 'Take in A' etc.

Since adopting a PC half way through the rewrite of The Kin (the first drafts of Po's Story and Mana's Story were done on a typewriter), I have done a lot of rewriting as I went along, until I had produced a draft I felt I could show to my editors for comment. I would then expect to do a fair amount of rewriting, using the existing file as a basis. I would add an asterisk to the folio number so that I could tell one sheet of hard-copy MS from another and mark any major changes in the file with an asterisk at start and finish, sometimes two asterisks where further revision took place.'

From the guide to the Peter Dickinson Collection, c 1967-2006, (Seven Stories, the Centre for Children's Books)