“Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.”
~ Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
An Editor or a Writer?
I seem not to be able to read for pleasure anymore. While supposedly doing some pleasure reading, I find myself in the editor’s chair. However, when I am writing, that editor takes a vacation, leaving me stranded.
A Gentle Way to Self-Edit
Don’t cross out. (That is editing as you write. Even if you write something you didn’t mean to write, leave it.) Don’t worry about spelling, punctuation, grammar. (Don’t even care about staying within the margins and lines on the page.) Lose control. Don’t think. Don’t get logical. Go for the jugular. (If something comes up in your writing that is scary or naked, dive right into it. It probably has lots of energy.) ~ Natalie Goldberg
On Writing and Painting . . .
Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain. There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred pages are there. Only you don’t see them. ~ Elie Wiesel
Writing and Editing, 27
“Writers come in two principal categories — those who are overtly insecure and those who are covertly insecure.” ~
Do you agree with the claim cited above? Why / not?
Writing and Editing, 3
“When an editor works with an author, she cannot help seeing into the medicine cabinet of his soul. All the terrible emotions, the desire for vindications, the paranoia, and the projection are bottled in there, along with all the excesses of envy, desire for revenge, all the hypochondriacal responses, rituals, defenses, and the twin obsessions with sex and money. In other words, the stuff of great books.” ~ Betsy Lerner, The Forest for the Trees