Finished entering the revisions to Chapter 9 yesterday and started on Chapter 10. Began reading David’s marginal comments and edits for Chapter 11.
I thought a series of essay-lets about issues that come up during the revision process might help understand why it takes so long.
This process of revisions is very difficult and very stressful, though perhaps not for the reasons you might expect.
The writing was done in very extended form — 750,000 words total for the full biography — in 2005, and then I cut it to about 580,000 words before giving it to my agent, the refulgent Eleanor Woods, to shop around. Tor picked up the complete biography in 2006 based on the cut version, with David Hartwell as the acquiring editor.
Leaving aside an extended section of the first volume that I knew would have to be redone in the editorial phase because the fictionalized treatment of a time in Heinlein’s life was incompatible with the more objective narrative of the rest of the biography, the original draft was written around extended quotations from Heinlein’s correspondence and other documentation.
The cutting was done in two stages: first, I “tightened” the prose by eliminating duplicative or unnecessary modifying clauses, such as: “he went into the hall and wound the clock” where the text had previously established that the clock he had to wind was in his hall. I also looked for places where I had stumbled into stylistic faults — strings of prepositional phrases and such — that could be replaced with shorter and more direct ways of expressing what I had to say.
The second phase of cutting was much more difficult: I tried to preserve as much in the way of incident as possible and instead cut quotations to just the meat of the matter and replaced that material, where necessary, with shorter, narrative summaries. I also tried to eliminate as much as possible of the seven thousand footnotes and citations by choosing to cite only direct quotations, and not the source of facts.
Between these two phases, the cut removed 170,000 words — about a quarter of the total volume.
David wanted to see the fact-citations restored, and also more of Heinlein’s words, so much of the editorial process has been a matter of putting back in material that was cut for the submission draft. Restoring more of Heinlein’s own words has been more prominent in the editorial process for volume 2 than I remember it being for volume 1. But that’s the easy part.
The harder part is (well, there have been several “harder parts,” but –) something that might be called “stylistic differences” in some aspects of what my sense is of what the prose ought to be like and my editor’s. This difficult process has shown me things about my own writing process that I may have been only faintly aware of before.
Over a period of forty-five years, I have developed certain stylistic devices, devices of intention, that have become habitual and very characteristic of my rather eccentric personal style.
My approach to “the paragraph,” for example, is highly “networked.” That is, I write paragraphs not only to express and develop an aspect of an idea — which is the pedagogical standard of what a paragraph is supposed to do — but also to relate this idea to the paragraph that preceded it and to prepare the way for the paragraph that will follow. In particular, the development points are organized so that the one which points most clearly in the direction the text is going to go is last. Often the last sentence of a paragraph will contain a word or an expression which will be repeated in the opening sentence of the next paragraph, or the next paragraph will back-reference material in the preceding paragraph.
The net effect of this technique is to give flow and impetus to the writing, so that it moves smartly along with logical force. Ideally you hit all the logical steps between one idea and the next so that the reader is not required to make logical jumps to cover, say, lack of evidence. On the evidence of what is said — and what is not said — in the reader reviews of the first volume, that technique did substantially what it is supposed to do. The book took hits for what might be called stylistic “elegance” but got points for being a fast read despite its size.
Of course, this technique can be used specifically for this purpose, and there are a few places in which I have no information about a subject, but by planning the organization of what I say about a related subject and using this back-referencing technique I covered the evidentiary gap by sleight of hand. No one, for example, has remarked on the fact that in the first volume there is a lot of information about Heinlein’s Grandfather Lyle — but almost nothing about his Grandfather Heinlein.
But David does not seem to like transitional sentences at all and tries to edit out what is, in my opinion, a damaging number of them (that is, damaging to my method of presentation). Part of the reason he may dislike them is that the back-referencing produces an effect something like repetition.
Now, this is something I have perhaps less respect for than I might. Repetition is one of the fundamental methods of prose, and particularly repetition. In fact, all of speech proceeds by a process of repetition and development, by the literary devices of metaphor and metonymy. But the fashion in the 20th century greatly sought to minimize the somewhat overblown developmental patterns that were fashionable in 19th century writing. Ernest Hemingway’s spare prose was taken as a model — actually, as the model for stylistics in American English writing for the better part of the 20th century.
David is about ten years older than I, and he was educated in the decades of the late forties to the late fifties, where the corresponding part of my education and literary exposure started in the late fifties and went on into the late sixties, when there was this little kerfluffle going on — you may have heard about it. David’s exposure is in the solidly-pro-Heminway phase; that consensus had started to beak up by the time my finishing work was started (though it seems to have recongealed some time thereafter).
I have an inadequate and I’m sure contemnable respect for prosodic standards which are, after all, nearly 100 years old by now. If Hemingway had not come along, something like Hemingway would have had to come into existence, because the Modernists needed to sweep away the excesses of Victorian prosody. But we’re in a post-Modern phase now; we are not occupied with the same issues, and the stripped-down-edness itself is, it seems to me, now excessive. Thesis – Antithesis – Synthesis become thesis.
But in my opinion a text as large as these volumes of biography needs every device I can bring to bear that will speed the reader along. My policy is to make as many of the changes David wants as I realistically can, and on the first pass edit I took out as many of the indicated transitions as I felt the text could stand. But every time a new ellision is marked in the second-pass edit, the job of deciding whether it can stand this stylistic edit becomes larger and more time consuming: it requires me to evaluate it in terms of the function it is performing in the text — and this can sometimes require a large-scale review of the preceding text and what follows. Consequently I can only get through about ten pages of corrected ms. per day, at most.
Finished typing in the corrections to Chapter 8 (they’ve just got back from the Tramp Royal round-the-world trip)
We’re in the second pass edit of the second volume. The question of a third volume has been put aside for the moment, to be revisited once we have a stable text. I figured the kind of light-touch additions involved in beefing up story descriptions would probably add something like 30,000 to the overall text, which would be big enough to split into two if we go that way.
Generally, David Hartwell sends me largish batches of edit, and then I read through it and make preliminary decisions about his marginal comments. Then it takes me anywhere from 3 days to a week to make the necessary changes for each chapter.
I received chapter 7-10 last week, and this morning I completed the read-through of chapter 10 (there are about 35 or 36, IIRC altogether) and started typing up the changes on Chapter 8 (chapter 7 being completed last week).
It’s been awhile since there was any real news to report. Following the worldcon last year, I had a transmetatarsal amputation of my right foot and was down for a couple of months but during recuperation completed the first-pass edit of the second volume, tentatively titled “The Man Who Learned Better” though I also favor “Time Enough for Love.”
We started the second pass edit late last year but had a long hiatus after chapter 6 while David Hartwell finished up other contracts.
One of the things I have found surprising about this edit is that David has wanted me to add back in a lot of stuff I had originally edited out — longer quotations from Heinlein’s writings, mostly. When I finished writing the manuscript in 2005, I had taken it (the second volume) from about 375,000 down to about 230,000 words — mostly by condensing and summarizing incidents that had been treated in draft by direct quotations, sometimes quite lengthy. (This process had been done with volume 1, as well).
Much of the new material David has asked for was thus avaiilable in my rough draft; sometimes, though, the edits required new research and writing, and citations that I Had not put in. This part can be quite difficult to manage, as finding a quotation in the chronological file of extracts that constitutes my research notes is often a matter of remember the exact words used, but the principal research was completed ten years ago, and that kind of highly-detailed memory has faded. I spent four days on one occasion trying to find one specific quotation, trying various combinations, and could not — so I had to remove that fact and its context from the narrative.
In the last week (late April, Early May 2012), the second-pass edit has resumed. I can only do about ten pages per day. But progress is actually under way again.
As is probably well known by now, [i]Learning Curve[/i] did [i]not[/i] win the Hugo Award at Renovation this year, losing to [i]Chicks Dig Time Lords[/i]. Unfortunately I was already ill with what turned into a full-blown attack of Diabetic Ketoacidosis, so I did not participate in any of the *festivities* and went into the hospital as soon as I got home (and had a transmetatarsal foot amputation).
I haven’t had a chance to analyze the balloting, but the voting was apparently close; perhaps their Twitter campaign six weeks ago pushed them over the top.
Just received word that Learning Curve has won the Locus Award. More news as it comes in.
The corrected trade paperback of volume 1 was released on the Midsummer solstice.
Although the trade paperbacks, significantly corrected from the harback first issue, are not due for release until next week (June 22), I found a bix box of author copies at my mail service yesterday. Unfortunately still no success getting Tor to schedule a book signing at Comic-Con.
Yesterday, May 10, I turned in my revisions for the first pass edit for chapters 1-10. Still not close enough to completion to foresee when a release date might be possible — but progress, and I forged on to chapter 11. David Hartwell has sent me up to chapter 30 of the first pass, so I’ve got a lot of work yet to do.
And in today’s e-mail was a notification that Volume 1 of the biography was nominated for the Locus Award. Here are the nominees in my category:
•Spectrum 17, Cathy & Arnie Fenner, eds. (Underwood)
•80! Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin, Karen Joy Fowler & Debbie Notkin, eds. (Aqueduct)
•Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century: Volume 1: 1907-1948: Learning Curve, William H. Patterson, Jr., (Tor)
•CM Kornbluth: The Life and Works of a Science Fiction Visionary, Mark Rich (McFarland)
•Charles Vess & Neil Gaiman, Instructions (Harper)
What I find particularly interesting about this list is the almost complete lack of overlap with the Hugo nominations for the same category. Curious.
