AtD: An editor's white whale?

[gp]

I don't think editors do a lot of work on manuscripts the way they did
back in the day - I've heard a few people mention this, most notably
Mark Z. Danielewski whose best advice for getting published was "send
a finished product so they can print it and be done with it" or
something to that effect.  He talked about how editors aren't going to
spend time on writers the way they did back in the day, a la Hemingway
etc.  This may not apply to well-known authors such as Pynchon,
however, but the increasing and then increasing-again page count seems
to indicate that if there's any editing going on it's not taking the
form of cuts.

On 11/4/06, Ya Sam <takoitov at hotmail.com> wrote:
> To tell the truth I don't know the details, but the question of editing
> Pynchon has always interested me as well. If I'm not mistaken, some 100
> pages were cut from the manuscript of V. However, he was an aspiring writer
> then and therefore more prone to compromise.
>
>
> >From: "Nathan D. Jerpe" <njerpy at bellsouth.net>
> >To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> >Subject: AtD: An editor's white whale?
> >Date: Sat, 4 Nov 2006 18:34:13 -0500
> >
> >I'm ignorant with respect to how publishing works, but does anybody know
> >whose task it was to edit Against the Day? Or, is this the sort of project
> >assigned to a team of editors? I've read that the final work comes in at
> >410,000 words; I'd be profoundly interested to hear how many words the
> >first drafts contained, or how long the editing process took, or how many
> >hairs the chief editor pulled out, when a manuscript two feet tall came and
> >gobbled up her desk.
> >
> >It's just that AtD is on par with some of the lengthiest, most ambitious
> >English novels ever written. If one were to account for the density and
> >difficulty of Pynchon's work, it may well be the most daunting editorial
> >undertaking of all time.
> >
> >Cheers,
> >Nathan
> >
>
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