Like Jack Torrance in the Overlook Hotel, Peter Benchley would have hammered out his manuscript on a manual typewriter. Each blank sheet of paper would have to be inserted into the platen and properly aligned, and at the end of every line the carriage would have to be returned manually. As the pages built up in a neat stack on his desk, the ink on the page would gradually fade until the ribbon would have to be changed. Typing was a physical and sometimes dirty chore. Mark Twain was one of the first authors to submit a typed manuscript to his publisher, although his claim that Tom Sawyer was the first novel to be written on a typewriter is generally disputed. Even if it's not true, it seems right. There is something particularly American about the typewriter and the detritus that surrounds it.
Of his writing habits, Benchley said, 'I sat in the back room of the Pennington Furnace Supply Co. in Pennington, New Jersey, in the winters, and in a small, old turkey coop in Stonington, Connecticut, in the summers, and wrote what turned out to be Jaws.' Benchley was not driven by a strong creative impulse to tell a story. It took him seven years to get the initial idea down on paper and then it took the encouragement of his editor Tom Congdon and a thousand dollar advance to flesh the story out to one hundred pages. From 1971 to 1973 (winters in the back room, summers in the turkey coop) Benchley wrote and rewrote the still untitled manuscript. It's unlikely, however, that much of that time was devoted to honing the language of the book.
'It is easy', says Nigel Andrews in his pocket movie guide on Jaws, 'to pick out bad passages.' He quotes a line from Chapter Five to illustrate his point: "Brody felt a shimmy of fear skitter up his back." Can a shimmy actually skitter? Isn't that rather like a jump leaping, or a hop skipping?
A few pages on Brody breaks the bad news to Ben Gardner's wife, a scene which Benchley records in a sentence that becomes as snarled as one of Quint's keg lines:
"She seemed calmer, but Brody was sure that the calm was a lull before the burst of grief that would come when she realized that the fears which she had lived with every day for the sixteen years she and Ben had been fishing professionally - closet fears shoved into mental recesses and never uttered because they would seem ridiculous - had come true."
It would be easy enough to trawl through the entire novel, netting an entire catch of cliches, purple prose and clunky phrasing, but - to mix a metaphor - that would be a bit like shooting fish in a barrel.
