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Editing & Revision
“… present tense is not a reason I categorically reject a novel submission. But it often becomes a contributing reason, because successful present tense novel writing is much, much more difficult to execute than past tense novel writing. Most writers, no matter how good they are, are not quite up to the task.” Read on to learn some of what’s required to carry it off. [via Editorial Ass]
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Three drafts of the opening to John Updike’s novel “Rabbit at Rest.”
via New York Times
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“Vladimir Nabokov referred to editors as ‘pompous avuncular brutes.’ T.S. Eliot said that many of them were just “failed writers.” And Kingsley Amis, that laureate of cantankerousness, spoke of how the worst kind
prowls through your copy like an overzealous gardener with a pruning hook, on the watch for any phrase he senses you were rather pleased with, preferably one that also clinches your argument and if possible is essential to the general drift of the surrounding passage.
Raymond Carver, at least to begin with, was on altogether better terms with his editor, Gordon Lish, to whom he once wrote, ‘If I have any standing or reputation or credibility in the world, I owe it to you.’”
via The Two Raymond Carvers | The New York Review of Books
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Mary Ann de Stefano
