t rolls eyes

If this is the stance she takes, no wonder her writing is so unbearably florid. There's believing in your convictions, then there's narcissistic public wanking. Bah.

For me, novel writing is a virtuoso performance. It is not a collaborative art

Look, life is a collaborative art. Rice is saying that she's never wrong.

In every situation in which I've worked with an editor, some of the editorial changes have been wrong, and I didn't make them. Some of them, on the other hand, were embarrassingly right. Rice is saying she can't bear any other human being to judge her work; that may be true, but it doesn't mean another human being's input wouldn't improve the work.

Hell, she had to get her kneepads somewhere, right? Oh, right, that was all *talent*. Sure. And I'm a Junior League member.

Anne Rice: Bwah-hah-haw snork! I can just imagine her sailing along, nose in the air, ignoring the copy editor pointing at the end of that short pier she's approaching. Her art is so great, she's beyond accepting input? My hind foot, sez one who used to buy her novels.

My little sister named her cat Mehitabel after archy & mehitabel. She was only about 8 then, so we were proud of her for noticing literature.

I have here in my hot little hands: The John Varley Reader. So what if I have original paperbacks containing most of the stories? There's new stuff in there.

Eh, I think Anne's a poor judge of her own writing then, but I can't begrudge her resistance to editing. I hate having an editor fuck with my stuff. If you've been blessed with good editors, then you're damn lucky, because there are plenty out there with all the subtly of a butcher taking apart a pig. (And so much of it is a matter of taste - are you going to tell Faulkner he's got too many adjectives and adverbs? That's part of his style, dense though it is. It's like bitching Van Gogh out for using impasto: "I can't really see their faces when you do it this way.")

I don't disagree with the assessment that Anne's writing needs editing, but I think it's absolutely normal for a creator to want to retain control over their work. Nobody would consider it unduly egotistical if a painter insisted on doing all the painting on the canvas. In fact, it would be considered unusual otherwise. Nobody expects Aaron Copland to change his score because somebody who is not even a composer thinks he should pick up the tempo in the third movement.

Do you think writing is a special case? I can see that argument, but I can't imagine the person who knows James Joyce's prose better than James Joyce. Obviously Joyce does not equal Rice, but she's clearly claiming she's the expert in Anne Rice Writing (for better or worse) and I don't think that's really very different.

Undoubtedly a good editor can make a huge positive difference in writing. I think being open to a good critic can be valuable for any creator. Personally, I value feedback and I know many of you depend on your beta readers. Still, I don't think it's particularly arrogant of her to not want to be edited. Just misguided.

I think it's absolutely normal for a creator to want to retain control over their work.

But as a writer, I have control over my work. The editor offers a set of suggestions which (in general) I am free to accept or reject. No doubt there are bad editorial situations in which the editor/copyeditor has final authority. That is a bad thing.

Nobody expects Aaron Copland to change his score because somebody who is not even a composer thinks he should pick up the tempo in the third movement.

Nope. But when Aaron Copland has a new work commissioned, the orchestra feels free to reply "Yo, Aaron, no French horn player known to man can hit that note." The first orchestra does provide feedback.

But there's a big difference between "You do realize you've used seventeen semicolons on this page?" and "Never use the passive voice." Anne Rice is claiming that she's worked so hard that no change could improve the work, and I call bullshit.

I think it's arrogant to assume that, in a 700-page novel, she has no spelling errors, no typos or misplaced homonyms, never forgot that James left the knife in the kitchen, and never typed "Frank" when she meant "Jerry".

I love my betas. I don't always agree with them. But they do force me to think about how a reader is going to respond to the story. If I want to have a lot of people read and like the story, it helps to have several different people read it and tell me what they liked and didn't like, and whether I made any mistakes. I can then make my decisions about what to keep and what to change, with an eye on the market.

If I have no concern with reader-response, then okay, I ignore all my beta comments. But then I don't get to bitch at people who don't respond positively. Because I made a conscious choice to avoid thinking about reader-response, and to write only for myself. I do post without beta sometimes, for a variety of reasons. But if it fails to please I don't snarl at the readers who aren't showering me in feedback.

Rice is cake-eating and cake-having.

And there's a broad spectrum of editing between rewriting someone's prose and just running spellcheck. I have no idea what Rice means when she says she hates editors, but it feels as if she won't let them even fix her typos.

I think Rice's arrogance comes from equating editing with "mutilating," which is a direct quote:

"I have no intention of allowing any editor ever to distort, cut, or otherwise mutilate sentences that I have edited and re-edited, and organized and polished myself."

I honestly don't think that there is a single piece of writing ever produced that couldn't benefit from at least one other person looking it over. I simply don't.

There are a lot of us here who are writers and editors, and I'll tell you, when I'm wearing my writer hat, I have fits when someone edits my work. I have the same Anne Rice reaction: it's PERFECT! Every word is exactly where it needs to be, etc., etc.

And then it turns out that some judicious editing makes my writing much better. And by "better," I mean "more readable."

Anne Rice may be the expert on Writing in the Style of Anne Rice. That's fine. But the real issue is this: is Writing in the Style of Anne Rice resulting in more readable prose?

t edit Or, what Suela said about reader response.

I think it's absolutely normal for a creator to want to retain control over their work.

Oh sure. To want to retain control, absolutely. But wanting something, and having that something be the right thing, are quite different.

I don't know a lot of musicians or visual artists, but the ones I do know will come to what they think is a stopping point (or even just a midway point) and ask, "What do you think?" They're not doing that to flatter me, and the ones who have something better than cotton wool between their ears aren't doing that to flatter themselves. They really want to know what I think, whether they're on the right track, what could stand improvement.

It's possible, nay, easy, to want the response to be, "Perfect! Don't change a thing!", but not asking the question at all is begging to be told the answer in unkind fashion (possibly, sales numbers).

I don't know a lot of musicians or visual artists,

Plus, composing and painting aren't the same types of processes as writing. If you've painted a canvas, and then it's poorly received, you have to start over with a blank canvas. There is no editing of a finished painting.

With writing, you don't have to throw out the mss. and start over (unless it sucks mightily; in which case, you have bigger problems). Writing lends itself much more to revision than do any visual art media.