by Mary Ann de Stefano on January 15, 2011
One space after the period or two spaces? This is one of the more hotly–and tediously–debated issues in writerly circles. (Another is the serial comma.) I’m a one-spacer myself. That’s Chicago Manual of Style
dictum, and I have been doing it ever since I read The Mac is Not a Typewriter
more than fifteen years ago.
In Slate, Farhad Manjoo explains why you should never use two spaces. But I’m not all that rabid about it. (Two spaces just seems silly to me, but certainly not worth arguing about.) If you want to hang onto your two spaces, just be consistent so you won’t drive your editor or typographer mad. If you want to change, but find it difficult, you can rig Word’s “AutoCorrect” function to fix it for you as you type.
by Mary Ann de Stefano on October 25, 2010
“Was Jane Austen at heart an experimental writer rather than a polished stylist? Were some of her novels, including Emma and Persuasion, reshaped by an editor who cared more about proper punctuation and grammar than the author did?
“Such notions would make some devotees of Austen’s much-praised style gasp. But the editor of a new digital edition of Austen’s fiction manuscripts says the drafts reveal the unedited novelist to be a more creatively unruly, grammar-bending writer than many people think.”
via The Chronicle of Higher Education.
“There is a dance between academics and arts reporters that has gone on long enough, in which scholars allow silly over interpretations of their claims to become news, while at the same time looking down on the news monger. In this case the result is a pedantic assault on genius that can only diminish the pleasure of readers and confuse students. Austen is a great artist – through and through. Her voice is her own.”
via The Guardian.
by Mary Ann de Stefano on October 25, 2010
A few weeks ago, I read Sean Penn may play Max Perkins in an upcoming movie. Perkins is the legendary literary editor who championed F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, encouraged Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings to write the book about a childhood in Florida that became The Yearling, and discovered and nurtured many other American writers.
He may be most famous for helping Thomas Wolfe to shape the unwieldy draft Of Time and the River. Wolfe wrote one scene, for example, where four people talked to each other for four hours for a total of 80,000 words–200 printed pages for a minor scene. Perkins helped Wolfe see that while the writing was good, the scene was wrong for the book and had to go.
It will be a challenge for the filmmakers to bring the editor/writer relationship to the screen in an interesting way. Can scenes of writing and editing and conversations between an editor and writer be made dramatic without becoming goofy and unrealistic?
Meanwhile, I am re-reading the book the movie will be based on: Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, by A. Scott Berg. I had forgotten how engrossing it is. Maybe Max’s story will make a good movie after all. I’ll suppress my cringe response for now, and hope the filmmakers do a decent job of casting Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Wolfe.
MAD about Words
is the brainchild (and heartchild) of
Mary Ann de Stefano
