Having your book edited is like watching your cat being operated on. It's uncomfortable and someone is probably going to get hurt. Most likely the cat. But in the end, things work out for the best and your cat is better it. And then your cat gets released in hardcover, and you have to read all of his reviews.
[Louis] Brandeis improves the prose. He simplifies it and perfects the balance of the sentence so it becomes even more memorable and aphoristic.
If people want to be better writers, they can't just read the blogs! You've got to look at something that's outside this rushing world of evanescent words.
Reading is the most rewarding form of exile and the most necessary discipline for novelists who burn with the ambition to get better.
Writers who don't read can't write well. It's that simple. The more you read, the better you read, the better you'll write. The upside is that you can't read too much, and even 'junk' reading can be constructive.
Writing is like anything - baseball playing, piano playing, sewing, hammering nails. The more you work on it, the better you get. But it seems to take a longer time to get better at writing than hammering nails.
But at the time when he wrote, Englishmen, with the rarest exceptions, wrote only in French or Latin; and when they began to write in English, a man of genius, to interpret and improve on him, was not found for a long time.
Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.
The age was still dark and reeked of the havoc and misfortunes of the Goths who had put all good literature to destruction. But, by God's goodness, in my time light and dignity were returned to letters, and I see there such improvement that today I would have great difficulty being admitted to the most elementary classes--I, who in my time was reputed to be (and not wrongly) to be the most knowledgeable person of the century.
What readers ask nowadays in a book is that it should improve, instruct, and elevate. This book wouldn't elevate a cow.
My most profound growth as a writer came when I joined an online critique group. What a harrowing, terrifying, wonderful experience that was.
