For Writers: How Raymond Chandler Revised The Long Goodbye

 I found Mark Coggins' Writing The Long Goodbye quite by accident. I was expending time and curiosity for another post that included a brief discussion of Raymond Chandler's novel. This did not seem to fit, but what I found fascinated me. Not enough to go into the matter in as much depth as I did in my earlier post. There are too many quotations in the original that need to be read. Which is, if not clear enough, why you should click the link above and read the original essay.

 Chandler’s method of rewriting was radical. Rather than keeping most of what was in his current draft and making accretive changes to it, he started nearly from scratch, saving only the few words or phrases that resonated from the previous draft. Returning to the movie making metaphor, Chandler’s rewrites were truly more akin to alternative takes where the director encouraged the actors to take a different line through the scene. Here’s a small sample of text from the Oxford manuscripts from the scene where Marlowe confronts Roger Wade about some stream-of-consciousness writing he’s typed while he was drunk.

Often lauded and criticized, Stephen King's On Writing struck me as having one great asset: seeing how King revised his work. For the same reason I urge you to read Coggins' article, I find this may be compensation for my youthful delusion that the first draft was the best draft.

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