What I ought to have said on that Fourth Street panel

[pameladean]

This year Fourth Street left room to drag people onto panels at the last moment. I had an hour and a half's warning of the first one, but missed completely the moment when I was put on the Sunday afternoon panel about how you know when to stop revising. skzb reasonably felt that, given the situation my book and I are in, I should be on this panel. I

Comments

[mizkit]

Man. And the bitter thing is that I want to read the original book you wrote. Not that I won't read this version, but I do so very much hope the long form makes it out there someday.

[oursin]

Me too.

I found it quite bad enough when a journal edited an article of mine with a chisel and hacksaw in order to make my deathless perfectly adequate, if UK-English, prose conform in a clonking way to some (US academic) style guide, rather than assuming that if the sentences were actually coherent and non-obscure of meaning, this was a pointless and timewasting exercise.

Not to mention, the losing of a lot of socially- and period-contextual stuff in the biography to get it down to desired length.

Much commiseration.

[pameladean]

I'd think this kind of wnolesale hacking would be even more dreadful in non-fiction. My stories are malleable (characters, not so much), but the facts of the matter are REAL. Oi.

P.

[oursin]

O well, doing the contextual stuff in detail has provided me with an entirely new project of research and writing spinning off.

I also do tend to deplore that thing that some non-fiction writers do which is put in stuff just because they have found it, even if it's tangential or not very interesting.

[pameladean]

Fiction writers do that too! "I suffered for my research, and you have to suffer too."

I'm glad you have an entirely new project. That is always a fine thing.

P.

[oursin]

They certainly do! - have just finished a 1940s Charlotte Yonge tribute novel in which the research is definitely showing (especially the conversation, or rather monologue with interjections, about the introduction and development of ironclads in the Royal Navy). Immense amount of period detail of the kind that would never have featured in the original! (just as anyone writing a novel now, set in Jane Austen's days, would be obliged to mention the Napoleonic Wars.)