Living books – on rewriting in the digital age
JA
May 24
A while ago, I blogged about Helen DeWitt, author of The Last Samurai (not of the Tom Cruise variety) and her ‘living’ book, Your Name Here. Back then, DeWitt was in the midst of writing her latest novel as an ever-growing, ever-changing text online. The rights have since been sold to Noemi Press, but according to some news around the blogosphere of late, DeWitt’s desire to create an ongoing text might still be plausible, at least with regard to the ebook format.
The Wall Street Journal Digits blog wrote recently about how Amazon were offering Kindle user’s ‘corrected’ versions of purchased texts, much like those regular, slightly annoying updates sent by iTunes or Adobe Flash. One notice published on Telereads stated:
We’re writing about your recent Kindle purchase of An Enemy of the State by F. Paul Wilson. The version you received contained some errors that have been corrected.
An updated version of An Enemy of the State is now available. It’s important to note that when we send you the updated version, you will lose any highlights, your last page read, and bookmarks made in your current version and the locations of any notes may not match the updated copy of the book.
The book in question was apparently missing the last three chapters in Kindle format. Readers complained and the mistake was fixed in a matter of days. This kind of advantage when it comes to ebooks has probably led to a collective sigh of relief among publishers. With print, any corrections must wait till the next edition and pulping or recalls can be extremely costly, not to mention embarrassing (Penguin Pasta Bible anyone?). For non-fiction in particular, the benefits are obvious – instead of deciding to release second or third editions, publishers could simply alter chapters as the facts changed.
But there are possibilities, or pitfalls, depending on how you see it, for fiction authors too.
MobyLives noted, somewhat tongue in cheek:
…in a commentary
for on inat the Christian Science Monitor, Matthew Shaerwondersasks if what novelist Wilsontermscalls “the ability to tinker forever” isreally something to write home about something to get all hot and bothered about such a good fucking ideanecessarily a good thing .“Most writers quickly learn that at some point, more noodling is only going to make a book or a blog post worse,” says Shaer. “One writer we know, for instance, writes out every one of his articles in ballpoint pen, so he isn’t distracted by the urge to go back and rejigger every single sentence. Perhaps as a result, his prose is a thing of wonder.”
I think that it’s true that a book is never really ‘finished’ in an objective sense – much of writing is in fact endless rewriting, and this is usually for the better. Too much polish however can sometimes rob a text of life and, at some point, we need to decide to stop. Usually, the finality of print provides this barrier.
But the possibility of changing a text after publication could have its points of interest too. I doubt that we’d be bereft of great works like Proust’s In Search of Lost Time if digital rewriting become permanent practice, as Shaer seems to be suggesting. Most novelists would probably want to refrain from editing their work to death and move on to the next project in time. What would be fascinating perhaps is the ability to see how drafts progress. Mediabistro recently reported on Matt Bell experimenting with writing and editing a story live (cheers to @Mean_land for the link). You can read the piece-in-progress here. Imagine what it would be like to observe something like that as an experiment by your favourite author, rather than having to wait until their drafts were surrendered to the Harry Ransom Centre. Food for thought.
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Comments
25 May 10 at 14:32
Toni Morrison writes the following: ‘I have always thought that as an editor for twenty years I understood writers better than their most careful critics, because in examining the manuscript in each of its subsequent stages I knew the author’s process, how his or her mind worked, what was effortless, what took time, where the “solution” to a problem came from. The end result — the book — was all that the critic had to go on.’ (‘The Site of Memory’, Inventing the Truth, William Zinsser [ed.], Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995) If, as you imagine, in the future we do get the chance to observe more writers carrying out something like Mat Bell’s experiment, perhaps critics and other readers will get the chance to ‘understand’ our favourite writers better? Thanks for a thought-provoking post.
...26 May 10 at 9:33
A great quote and yes, certainly interesting to think of how the chance to see drafts or read a work-in-progress might alter the way we read or review. Glad you liked the post.
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