redlines and revisions, continued

I'm in the thick of reviewing a client's responses to copyedits, a process that has included some muttering under my breath at Microsoft Word (which I get along with for the most part, but there have been a couple of spots where a random style seems to have suddenly imposed itself -- on random phrases, of course -- and that is Not Okay).

That said, it is so nice being able to deal with all the slicing, deleting, and repositioning by merely tapping and scrolling and clicking (and swearing). Here's another look at Miss Welty at work, as described by Suzanne Marrs:

By the time she was at work on Delta Wedding in 1945, Eudora had become an ardent revisor, using a method she would ever afterward follow--typing a draft chapter, spreading it out on the bed, or on the dining room table downstairs, cutting paragraphs, or even sentences, out of a page and attaching them with straight pins in new locations, before preparing a new typescript and starting the process again.

And here's Eudora writing to Bill Maxwell in 1953, after reading a draft of one of his stories:

I do see from this how elegant rubber cement is. I'm so used to writing with a pincushion that I don't know if I can learn other ways or not, but I did go right down and buy a bottle of Carter's. The smell stimulates the mind and brings up dreams of efficiency. Long ago when my stories were short (I wish they were back) I used to use ordinary paste and put the story together in one long strip, that could be seen as a whole and at a glance -- helpful and realistic. When the stories got too long for the room I took them up on the bed or table & pinned and that's when my worst stories were like patchwork quilts, you could almost read them in any direction. No man would be bemused like that, but Emmy [Maxwell's wife] will understand -- and on the whole I like pins. The Ponder Heart was in straight pins, hat pins, corsage pins, and needles, and when I got through typing it out I had more pins than I started with. (So it's economical.)

What There Is To Say We Have Said (Houghton, 2011)