Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2002 08:56:30 -0400
From: "Michael Walsh" <MJW at mail.press.jhu.edu>
To: <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Could use some editing, was So Many Universes, So
	Little Time
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

Well, there's a boatload of scribblers who don't get edited because most =
publishers don't do that.

mjw

>>> eginter at klgai.com 04/16/02 04:01PM >>>

Anne McCaffrey. Marion Zimmer Bradley. Who else gets away with it now that
they're a Big Name?

Eric
-----Original Message-----
From: Ted White [mailto:tedwhite at compusnet.com]
Sent: Tuesday, April 16, 2002 3:47 PM
To: WSFA members
Subject: [WSFA] Re: So Many Universes, So Little Time

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 increasingl=
y
he
went unedited as well.

Too bad.

--Ted White