SubscribeCritics have always marvelled at Trollope's stamina - 250 words per quarter of an hour between 5.30 and 8.30 in the morning - while ignoring the fact that this was just how Trollope worked. A huge advance and instructions to come back in five years - the fate of today's Booker winners - would have had him shaking his head in disbelief.
This is P. G. Wodehouse's last—and unfinished—book. It is unfinished not just in the sense that it suddenly, heartbreakingly for those of us who love this man and his work, stops in mid-flow, but in the more important sense that the text up to that point is also unfinished. A first draft for Wodehouse was a question of getting the essential ingredients of a story organised—its plot structure, its characters and their comings and goings, the mountains they climb and the cliffs they fall off. It is the next stage of writing—the relentless revising, refining, and polishing—that turned his works into the marvels of language we know and love. When he was writing a book, he used to pin the pages in undulating waves around the wall of his workroom. Pages he felt were working well would be pinned up high, and those that still needed work would be lower down the wall. His aim was to get the entire manuscript up to the picture rail before he handed it in. Much of Sunset at Blandings would probably still have been obscured by the chair backs. It was a work in progress. Many of the lines in it are just placeholders for what would come in later revisions—the dazzling images and conceits that would send the pages shooting up the walls.
Here also is a site you might find useful: The Writing Life - Quirks and Idiosyncrasies
posted by Rubber Soul at 1:54 PM on August 13, 2006