YANAmazon, but…
February 27, 2014 5:19 AM   Subscribe

I stumbled across an older book, and I'd love to find others like it. Help?

I recently came across Jay Woodruff's A Piece of Work, which includes some writers’ drafts and their revisions, along with interview material about the process of making changes to their writing. I’d love to find some other books like this, but Amazon is no help, and LibraryThing’s Book Suggester didn’t turn up anything especially relevant.

Do you know of any books that give multiple writers’ perspectives on revision (in some depth) and/or show progression of a piece from draft to finished product? I’m aware of the section in King’s On Writing that does this; I’m hoping for something focused largely on revision.

Thanks.
posted by xenization to Writing & Language (8 answers total) 12 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: It's a literary journal, rather than a book, but I think this is what Draft: the Journal of Process is supposed to be about.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 5:23 AM on February 27, 2014


Best answer: One Book Five Ways
posted by Daily Alice at 5:29 AM on February 27, 2014


Best answer: The title essay of Janet Malcolm's collection Forty-One False Starts is exactly that, 41 attempts at writing an opening for an essay about the painter David Salle. It's amazing, one of the richest documents of the process of a great writer I've ever seen.
posted by escabeche at 5:44 AM on February 27, 2014 [1 favorite]


Best answer: Ezra Pound completely revised TS Eliot's the Wasteland, and in a recent edition they reprint the original with Pound's red lines and comments all over it. It is awesome.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 7:26 AM on February 27, 2014


Best answer: A first-draft version of Finnegans Wake may be interesting in that you can follow the thread of it much more easily and see how Joyce built up the text by riffing on his earlier draft(s).
posted by Monsieur Caution at 10:41 AM on February 27, 2014


Best answer: The Curiosities is an anthology by Maggie Stiefvater, Brenna Yovanoff and Tessa Gratton, and it contains multiple drafts, along with their notes for each other, and their revisions of the pieces as well.
posted by headspace at 2:22 PM on February 27, 2014




Response by poster: Great stuff, all. Thanks so much!
posted by xenization at 9:14 AM on March 2, 2014


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