AtD: An editor's white whale?

[Nathan D. Jerpe]

Well, I sort of read things the other way around. An author gets famous, 
becomes self-indulgent, and writes something twice as long as it needs to 
be. Then the editors shake him by the lapels and make him cut it.

There's something depressing though, about the idea of editors not spending 
time on writers like they used to. Like it gets in the way of profit, or 
something.

Nathan

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "gp" <wescac at gmail.com>
To: "Ya Sam" <takoitov at hotmail.com>
Cc: <njerpy at bellsouth.net>; <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, November 05, 2006 11:27 PM
Subject: Re: AtD: An editor's white whale?


>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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