edit
Pounding out a first draft is like hoeing a row of corn—you just keep your head down and concentrate on getting to the end. Revision is where fine art begins. It’s thrilling to take an ending and pull it backward like a shiny thread through the whole fabric of a manuscript, letting little glints shine through here and there. To plant resolution, like a seed, into chapter one. To create new scenes, investing a character with the necessary damage, the right kind of longing. To pitch out boldly and try again. To work every metaphor across the whole, back and forth, like weaving. I love that word “fabrication,” because making an elaborate fiction feels so much like making cloth.
Answer to the question, “Do you go through a lot of drafts?” in the FAQs, http://barbarakingsolver.net.
Stet is my slogan.
Letter to Louis Untermeyer, September 6, 1938, in The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), 311.
The important thing in life is not what you get, but what you throw out.
In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter, directed by Tomas Leach (2014).
A dissolve is a film technique, usually a transition from scene to scene where image A begins to fade out, overlapped with the fade in of image B. And it’s a technique which even predates cinema. It comes from magic lantern days when they were doing slide to slide. Rather than having a cut, just a slam, they would do an overlap. It was more pleasing. Nowadays you don’t see too many dissolves in movies. And I never paid attention to when they went out of fashion. And Kevin Tent, my editor, and I think they’re beautiful. I happen to be a big fan of Hal Ashby films in the ’70s and to my mind, he an ex-editor, was a master of dissolves, and particularly long dissolves. For me, they lend emotion to a film and there’s a kind of a melancholy that comes from them.
“Director Alexander Payne on Mining Every Film for Comic Potential,” Fresh Air with Terry Gross, NPR, December 2, 2013.
Handwritten corrections on typed work (stuff crossed out, added, words respelled) are not only accepted but encouraged, since they’re usually signs of sedulous proofreading. Better right than neat (as long as it’s readable).
Syllabus for David Foster Wallace’s class “English 102-Literary Analysis: Prose Fiction Fall ’94,” Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin; link here
Take things away until you cry.
“What Advice Would You Give a Graphic Design Student?,” Frank Chimero’s blog, August 20, 2010.
It is toward the end of the second draft, if I’m lucky, when the feeling comes over me that I have something I want to show to other people, something that seems to be working and is not going to go away. The feeling is more than welcome, yes, but it is hardly euphoria. It’s just a new lease on life, a sense that I’m going to survive until the middle of next month. After reading the second draft aloud, and going through the piece for the third time (removing the tin horns and radio static that I heard while reading), I enclose things in boxes for Draft No. 4. If I enjoy anything in this process it is Draft No. 4. I go searching for replacements for the words in the boxes. The final adjustments may be small-scale, but they are large to me, and I love addressing them.”
John McPhee, “Draft No. 4: Replacing the Words in Boxes, New Yorker, April 29, 2013.
Copy editors attend the flow of the prose and watch for the leaks.
John McPhee, “Draft No. 4: Replacing the Words in Boxes,” New Yorker, April 29, 2013.
Read a wonderful definition by Henry James (senior) of what true progress is. Progress is a process like the modeling and carving of a statue from a block of marble, the elimination of all that is superfluous. The marble, the material, is nothing. The important thing is the carving, the trimming off of the superfluous.
March 9, 1891 entry, in Tolstoy’s Diaries: Volume 1 1847-1894. Selected, ed., and trans. by R. F. Christian (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 304.
I’m so used to writing with a pincushion that I don’t know if I can learn other ways or not, but I did go right down and buy a bottle of Carter’s [rubber cement]. The smell stimulates the mind and brings up dreams of efficiency. Long ago when my stories were short (I wish they were back) I used to use ordinary paste and put the story together in one long strip, that could be seen as a whole and at a glance—helpful and realistic. When the stories got too long for the room I took them up on the bed or table & pinned and that’s when my worst stories were like patchwork quilts, you could almost read them in any direction…. The Ponder Heart [novella originally published in the New Yorker in 1953] was in straight pins, hat pins, corsage pins, and needles, and when I got through typing it out I had more pins than I started with. (So it’s economical.)
Letter to William Maxwell, September 10, 1953, in What There Is to Say We Have Said, ed. by Suzanne Mars (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2011), 41–42.
The order of pieces in a given book is mostly a matter of trying to make sure they don’t get in each other’s way. Much like hanging pictures for a show. Some pictures fight other pictures, not because either is a bad picture, but because the scale fights or the color fights.
Interview with J. D. O’Hara (1981), in Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews (New York: Random House, 1997), 282–83.
Some people like to believe that being edited is a tense and acrimonious business but my experience of the process has always been quite the opposite. Carin Besser at the New Yorker encouraged me to let the stories be. Just be. A lot of the editing involved peeling away layers of personal anxiety, not in any therapeutic sense, but in the art—scraping off trace deposits left in the tone, removing lines of dialogue that were overly articulate, scorifying exposition that was false because it interfered.
“Nam Le,” interviewed by Charles D’Ambrosio, BOMB magazine, Issue 108, Summer 2009.