The backdrop: yesterday’s posting “Days of grief and anger”. Lise Menn’s comment on it:
— LM: Wonderful writing; may the message reach some new ears.
And my response:
— AZ >LM: Thank you; I hope so. As for the writing, that took hours, of revisions ranging from the minute to the global, with a lot of weeping, but stoked by rage that had to be crafted to present itself as an passionate outpouring of spontaneous feeling, complete with an urgent comma splice. So it pleases me to have it my craft recognized and appreciated; I’ve been working on it for almost 75 years now, but here it’s crucial that I not come off like a splenetic geezer.
Yes, I was a kid 75 years ago, and I was already honing my craft as a professional writer and editor, going on to edit my high school newspaper (and write a humor column for it), finally getting paid for my writing at the age of 17, when I began four years of work at the Reading (PA) Eagle newspaper (one of the jobs that got me through Princeton). All those years later I’m writing, every day of the year, essays — academic entertainments, as I think of them — for this blog.
I am a facile writer — first drafts are a lot of fun — and I have plenty of material to work with, but most of the work of writing is revising, rewriting, reframing, polishing, and editing. It can take stunning amounts of time.
So now I bring you two writing stories, the first about Geoff Pullum and me, writing a one-page abstract on Auxiliary Reduction in English for a 1997 Linguistic Society of America conference paper, an abstract offered to the program committee at the time; the second about E. B. White, writing a single paragraph for William Shawn (the New Yorker editor from 1952 through 1987) on the 1969 moon landing. Pullum & Zwicky had 25 versions labeled as drafts, with of course an enormous amount of churn during each of those revisions (and still at least one typo survived in the published version); White’s piece had 6 versions labeled as drafts, with, again, lots of churn during each revision (but at least the magazine’s staff ensured that the published version was flawless).
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