"She exposes the motives and agendas and prejudices at the heart of the Plath industry. She brilliantly indicts the whole enterprise of biography itself, comparing biographers to burglars rifling through people’s drawers.... She emphasizes the total impossibility of ever knowing the truth of another person’s life.... At one point, she gave the unfinished manuscript of 'The Silent Woman' to Philip Roth. He gave it a slashing edit, with often nasty comments in the margins. He violently disapproved of her putting herself in as a character. He hated her metaphors and accused her of intellectual shallowness. Another writer might have been crushed or paralyzed, but Malcolm simply addressed what she thought were the few useful parts of his criticism and put aside the rest. She scribbled playful and defiant responses to his edits in the margins: 'What’s bugging you, Philip? she said, with a sad shake of her head.' Later, in an unpublished interview, she said, 'I didn’t accept his dislike of the book.' Some of his crankiness, she thought, arose from being a man of the 1950s reading about the female experience.... To take this incident with equanimity, to not let it undermine either her friendship or her manuscript, requires a very expansive and shockingly healthy sense of self...."
Writes Katie Roiphe, in
"Janet Malcolm Understood the Power of Not Being 'Nice'/The writer is remembered, above all, for her ruthlessness. But when I went looking for it, I found something much more complicated" (NYT).
Have you ever endured a serious edit from someone you had to respect? Some writers fear even putting themselves in the position of needing to see one. Have you ever given one or offered to give one and had the writer miss what you thought was the chance to step up to a higher level? It's a painful process, editing. So says the blogger.
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26 comments:
I can say that my first book was significantly improved by my editor, who is a friend and did the work for free. It was indeed painful at times to accept her editing (and at times I did push back and won, but as the process went on, I got better at picking my battles).
Because I was and am a novice and was and am deeply averse to the traditional processes of finding an agent and/or a publisher (rejection! Ugh!), I self-published and promoted it only to the extent of my personal contacts. For the second book, I was similarly averse to asking my friend to edit it because this time I figured I'd better pay her... so I suspect it's not as tight as the first, though I strive mightily to put on my editor hat the way she wore it. Not sure what I'll do about the third in the series - at present I'm floundering in a plot hole anyway.
As far as serious writing review, senior technical reviews of environmental engineering reports included extensive weasel word vocabulary to describe the significant uncertainty. Usually a significant review involved actual scissors and tape.
You quickly learn not to be so precious about it.
Didn't Isaac Asimov believe in first draft only, no edits? I'm assuming he made allowances for spelling and grammar mistakes but everything else was as it was first written.
I'm not sure about Asimov, but Heinlein had an arrangement with his original publisher that if he, the publisher, ever rejected one of Heinlein's submissions, Heinlein would leave and never come back. Eventually of course he, the publisher, did reject something, and Heinlein kept his promise
I once gave someone a serious read. He book needed radical cutting in some places and there were other places were it could be expanded to great advantage because he had unique knowledge of a certain experience of great interest. He appreciated my comments. None of his other readers did anything like that. But he wanted ME to rewrite the book for him. And this was someone who'd never said one kind word to me. I had the sense to say no.
"Have you ever endured a serious edit from someone you had to respect?"
In the screenwriting world, one can pay readers for notes. I got notes from a guy (a Canadian) who had some connection to the writer of the movie "Miss Sloane" starring Jessica Chastain.
His first sentence regarding my Oscar-worthy "Frankenstein, Part II", "This needs a page one rewrite."
Have you ever endured a serious edit from someone you had to respect?
Literally all the damned time. Of course mostly these were technical specifications like a System Design Document or a Database Design Document for a government project or a paper for an international technical conference or an article for a refereed technical journal. You get used to it.
He ruthlessly criticized her writing, by her request, in notes on her unpublished manuscript that no one else was expected to see. She, on the other hand, ruthlessly criticized other writers in her published book. Both were legitimate -- any writer needs to be able to accept criticism -- but there's an ocean of difference between the two.
Two of my kids have been readers for me. They are brutal. It's for the best, though. Rip off the bandaid.
I've edited a few short works for people - from business related process specifications to personal letters appealing for love. It is indeed difficult to do well, and only worth doing if done well.
The most enlightening edit I ever received was on my first grant proposal to the federal government, before submittal. The edit was done by a computer scientist / English professor at Georgia Tech, who compiled successful and unsuccessful grant language and word usages in a database, He compared my efforts to his database, using 1980s PC and a self-written code. Then he suggested addition and deletion of a few key words, and away the proposal went. Success on the first try, grant obtained. Thanks, DARPA!
I, for one, would like to read that "Frankenstein - Part II" screenplay, either before or after the pro edit.
The idea of "editing" depends upon the notion that the purpose of the work is known and agreed upon.
Yes, I have had serious editing by someone I respect, a former supervisor. It improved my writing by a considerable amount, and I am grateful for the criticism.
I edit, and am edited, every day at work. I think the process is very, very, very, very good, important and also especially necessary.
My history masters thesis had to pass critique by three profs, but I also let a non-committee member review it.
I had been in classes and seminars with all four, and had worked with them in various capacities on and off campus.
The only one with anything much to say was the fourth, the only woman and far to the left of me, who was very helpful and made me rethink some bits. (I have since learned some things about my topic that someone else will have to put before the waiting world.)
Later, I spent two unpaid years editing a local-regional history annual, but with a light hand--it was hard enough getting literate submissions in the first place.
Writing student revue scripts, I got edited by our stage manager. Lotsa red ink, and I immediately saw he was right. Everyone needs an editor.
Philip Roth is dead. Does anyone born this century read his stuff? He’s like the Jewish Updike. Or Updike is the MASP (Middle Anglo-Saxon Protestant) Philip Roth. Their writing style is decent but biodegradable. I wouldn’t change a word of either’s work. It’s what they wanted. Same with Tom Wolfe.
If you write a book that has anything even slightly resembling a feminist take on the 1950s, wouldn't Philip Roth be the last person you'd give it to for comments? Well, in this case, maybe second to last. Ted Hughes wouldn't be a good choice either.
Roth is a little more durable than Updike. Much of Roth's writing revolves around a community that he knew well. Updike was foundering/floundering about in suburbia and trying to sum up America. But as Roth's Weequahic fades from the memory, his writing isn't likely to endure. There's not much talk about Bernard Malamud now either.
Well Roth did say he was the last of serious literary fiction writers at least for this era. The industry is all fantasy sci-fi magick LGBTQ YA crap now.
I do hope lit fic makes a comeback in my lifetime.
IMO it's too early to write off Updike (or Roth, for that matter, despite my personal preference for the Gentile).
Weasel words in a technical spec are like alligators in a Florida swamp, you might not notice the alligators at first, but once you know how to spot them, you can't miss them, and they are everywhere. Each one of them a landmine waiting to blow up your budget.
The skill is transferable to other forms of writing too. Once it becomes a habit to ask questions like "what exactly does 'red' mean here," you gain a far deeper understanding of any reading matter you encounter.
Philip Roth, though, is great, I am happy that I lived in a time when reading him was a thing.
Why did she bother with that pig misogynist serial shiska-abusing Philip Roth, who sees all women as Nazis slathering for his precious netherthings?
Then again, Janet Malcolm never had good taste in men, to say the least.
I've been an editor, and a not bad one. You have to let authors make their own mistakes while improving their prose. I believe writers believe what they say. So, Goodbye Columbus, Philip, and keep your extremely impressive dick out of my refrigerator.
Your purported victimization hardly rises to any occasion.
Ulrike was the greatest novelist after the wars. He saw straight through Roth, renaming him and Norman Mailer in his satirical Henry Bech series, but always had deep respect for Saul Bellow.
Updike, not Ulrike.
Mcculough: I won't ask you to dive into the Rabbit series, the greatest American character since John O'Hara could temporarily pull his head out a bottle, but try Updike's In the Beauty of the Lilies. Especially if you are aging, at any age.
Lazarus: you are entirely wrong. Updike was raised fragile lower to lower middle-class in rural Pennsylvania. That informs all his work. He was entirely self-made. When he became successful, he wrote about that milieu, but always an outsider.
My dad's father was a WASP. Yet he couldn't support his children after their mother died of TB. He was impoverished trying to pay to keep her alive. He made bad choices, but he was poor and worked hard.
The important thing to understand about these writers is that the only real war is the class war. Colleges should be teaching this now, enough of the trans-Gaza bullshit.
Updike might have felt like an outsider in suburbia, but he was always welcome in their homes and apparently in their beds. I just remember him stretching out the Rabbit series to try to take in everything that was going on in each decade and not succeeding. Also, all the coupling in Couples and then the poems about tampons and feces. I've heard that Updike's stories are better and worth reading, but I haven't got around to it and am unlikely to do so now.
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