Writing Stuff - Editing, A Unique Novel, Who Shot the Deputy?, Lit Crit TLS -Style

 A hodgepodge, put together while in a particularly vile mood.

From Daniel Lavery and The Chatner, The Problem With Being Edited, the reactions to being edited by magazine editors.

Like any writer, I can also get defensive about certain turns of phrase I think ought to be safeguarded by a Preservation Society, or think I’ve done something well and want to protect it from change — but my usual problem with receiving edits is not being asked to change, it’s being asked to think.

The first round doesn’t usually go too badly, especially since the first round of edits usually come from my agent, who I know and like very well, or the editor I’ve already been working with most closely at whatever magazine has commissioned the piece. “I know you,” my lower-brain says in tones of real relief. “You are not a stranger to me, and bear me no ill-will. I can do a series of modest favors for you in and remain cheerful.” I might dodge the email for a few days if it arrived during a moment where I particularly did not want to be emailed, or if I’m in the middle of an especially exciting round of Civilization 6, or something. But I’ll get around to it.

The real problems arrive with the second round of edits. Now I am being sent editable PDFs or Microsoft Word documents with track changes turned on, and the margins are flurried with little notes about “” and [Remove P] and I begin to bristle. People I’ve never met before, people I’ve never heard of in my goddamn life, are leaving me little notes like “Source?” and “Move to second graf?” and I start to sound like Mr. Banks from Mary Poppins (Who are you people? What the devil are you doing in my home? Clear out, all of you!) or a cornered villain in a movie about hostages (You’re the one who’s killing her with every step you take towards me!).

I would like to have this problem. Gloom rises up and brings along its pal Doom, and I think all I have been doing will be for naught.

 A Lot of Pain and A Lot of Humor: Ottessa Moshfegh on Dinah Brooke’s Lord Jim at Home leaves me convinced that I re-started writing fiction too late. I have no time to work on style or construct anything beyond the brainless noodling I have spent too much time typing (and will waste even more time typing).

When Lord Jim at Home was recommended to me, it came with no introduction. I’m glad. I wouldn’t have wanted the effect of the novel to be mitigated in any way, so I’m reluctant to introduce it now. But I will share with you my experiences: I read very slowly at the beginning, studying Dinah Brooke’s uncanny descriptions and syntax, squinting hard to see around the curves and outcroppings of the story, stepping back in astonishment to watch a sentence unfurl like some wild plant, surreal in its beauty and dangerous in its intelligence

Ok, Bob who did shoot the deputy? 

The Times Literary Supplement literary criticism page. Since I still have hopes of my Marlowe play being written, I looked at Of his time: Shakespeare’s concerns don’t always coincide with ours, and A more brilliant bird: Compiling the canon of Shakespeare’s first critic and rival.  The latter is interesting, but the former had a paragraph that provoked an attachment.

Orgel writes with elegant common sense, though, as he acknowledges, common sense is “culturally specific”. He biopsies culturally specific moments, from sixteenth-century audience responses to editorial assumptions, approaching them, initially, through performance: “tastes change, and theater is the great barometer of taste”. The greatest international theatre success in Shakespeare’s day was not Hamlet (that was a nineteenth-century invention), but “a comedy we care nothing about”: the anonymous Nobody and Somebody. In England the most popular plays on stage in Shakespeare’s lifetime were Titus Andronicus and Pericles.

But if audiences are barometers of taste, so too are readers. Only after the Restoration did Shakespeare become marketable as a playwright; early-modern readers knew Shakespeare as a poet. (Wearing his general editor’s hat, Orgel points out that the narrative poems are low-sellers in his Pelican series.) But even in the Elizabethan period “Shakespeare” is not easily identifiable. Robert Allott’s commonplace collectionEngland’s Parnassus (1600) attributes John of Gaunt’s dying speech to Michael Drayton. As Orgel observes, “Shakespeare does not sound to us like Drayton … but in 1600, at least to one reader, he did”. Similarly, A Lover’s Complaint, at the end of the sonnets, “may well have sounded like Shakespeare to Thorpe [the publisher]”. What sounds like Shakespeare is no more stable than is the text of Shakespeare.

TLS's North American literature has interesting stuff, only I may be running out of time here and must pass by.

sch 9/14