RARA-AVIS: Re: The Long Goodbye (the book, not the movie)

From: sethharwoodpodcast ( seth@sethharwood.com)
Date: 05 Aug 2007


Mark,

Great article. Really interesting. I've taken a look at some of Hemingway's manuscript pages in my day and he marked the hell out of them too, but them I'm not sure if he went as extreme as Chandler in the rewriting.

I wonder if you think Chandler would scrap so much of what he'd gotten down in the first draft (everything he didn't underline) partly because of the typewriter and that changes meant re-typing up the whole page. I think it'd be fresher and less monotonous to re-invent most of the page, except for the key words, as you retyped the thing. Otherwise, he'd have felt like a secretary for so much of the work. I can't imagine retyping a whole manuscript today. Ouch.

But at the same time, I think this method probably was a great tool to use and it clearly helped him to produce some of the tightest, best prose I can think of. Do you think he'd have done anything close to this method today? How do you view revision? I think with today's technology most of us probably rewrite far less than writers in Chandler's day.

Seth Harwood Jack Palms Crime

--- In rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, "coggins@..." <coggins@...> wrote:
>
> Hello All,
>
> Wanted to share an article I did about the writing of The Long Goodbye.
> It's based on some research I did at the Raymond Chandler archive at
Oxford
> University:
>
>
http://www.immortalgame.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=RaymondChandler.WritingTheLo
> ngGoodbye
>
> best,
>
> Mark
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
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