Date: Tue, 16 Apr 2002 15:47:06 -0400
From: Ted White <tedwhite at compusnet.com>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: So Many Universes, So Little Time
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

Steve Smith wrote:

> [...]
>
> In all of RAH's later work (TNotB and after), I get a strong feeling
> that he really, really needed a good editor.  Lotta good stuff, mixed in
> with a lot of crap that a less exalted author wouldn't be allowed to get
> away with.

And for good reason:  by then Heinlein could write his own contracts.

Heinlein's original writing scheme (for novels at least) was to overwrite -- by
maybe 50%.  That is, he wrote *everything* -- all the connective tissues, all the
conversations, etc.   Then he *edited* -- in the process discarding the chaff and
saving the wheat, and shortening his novel by as much as one-third.   This
resulted in a number of good books.

Supposedly he stopped doing this with STRANGER -- which he had begun in the late
'40s and then set aside, using the same Martian setup for his juvenile, RED
PLANET, and which he completed about ten years later.  (But when the
"unexpurgated" version of STRANGER was released we discovered that he had in fact
chopped some of the more embarrassing parts of that book as well.)  In any event,
Heinlein became increasingly self-indulgent after STRANGER, and increasingly he
went unedited as well.

Too bad.

--Ted White