Three drafts of the opening to John Updike’s novel “Rabbit at Rest.”
via New York Times
Editing & Revision
“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
MAD about Words
is the brainchild (and heartchild) of
Mary Ann de Stefano
