Wow. Just ... wow.
And though I am devoted to my editor, I always had mixed feelings about this process of receiving her comments and responding to them.After the publication of the The Queen of the Damned, I requested of my editor that she not give me anymore comments. I resolved to hand in the manuscripts when they were finished. And asked that she accept them as they were. She was very reluctant, feeling that her input had value, but she agreed to my wishes. I asked this due to my highly critical relationship with my work and my intense evolutionary work on every sentence in the work, my feeling for the rhythm of the phrase and the unfolding of the plot and the character development. I felt that I could not bring to perfection what I saw unless I did it alone. In othe words, what I had to offer had to be offered in isolation. So all novels published after The Queen of the Damned were written by me in this pure fashion, my editor thereafter functioning as my mentor and guardian.
I am perfect. I need no editor.
Well, if she keeps selling as she does, there must be some truth to it. I'd heard that once authors "made it," they stopped being edited, or at least edited so much. Now I hear that it is true. At least for one.
The mind...boggles.
Comments (3)
I know that Thomas Harris has the same arrangement, among others. But it does boggle - much easier done in books, where the audience buys authors than in TV or movies, where the work itself is more important to the early buys.
Posted by Alex | September 25, 2003 10:34 PM
Posted on September 25, 2003 22:34
Danielle Steel still sells. V.C. Andrews still sells and she's dead. I think Anne Rice's sales have more to do with people who will buy anything her name is on rather than any perfection in her writing.
Posted by Anne | September 26, 2003 9:23 AM
Posted on September 26, 2003 09:23
Wow. The combination of hubris and complete introspective blindness in that piece is...amazing.
The irony, of course, is that a message whose theme is "I write so well, all the time, that I need no editor", is in fact turgid, lifeless, repetitive, and dull. I have not read any of the Anne Rice oevre - and, if it's anything like that message, I never shall. Just ew.
Posted by ShadowSpawn | September 26, 2003 4:28 PM
Posted on September 26, 2003 16:28