KV's editing techniques

Anyone know how Kurt edits his books, if he does at all, i.e. does
revise drafts; you might convince me that some of his books were
improvised, or written in one go. Or could point to interviews
wherein he discusses this? My hypothesis is that the fast pace of
most of his novels is due to his dissatisfaction with traditional
fictional writing styles and his subsequent decision to simply
entertain himself first in writing, but hoping to also entertain
readers, and always conscious of portraying the world as a beautiful
place despite its many failures.

Pal Nym cast forth electrons:

 > Anyone know how Kurt edits his books, if he does at all, i.e. does
 > revise drafts; you might convince me that some of his books were
 > improvised, or written in one go. Or could point to interviews
 > wherein he discusses this? My hypothesis is that the fast pace of
 > most of his novels is due to his dissatisfaction with traditional
 > fictional writing styles and his subsequent decision to simply
 > entertain himself first in writing, but hoping to also entertain
 > readers, and always conscious of portraying the world as a beautiful
 > place despite its many failures.

In TIMEQUAKE he wrote:

"Tellers of stories with ink on paper, not that they matter
anymore, have been either swoopers or bashers. Swoopers
write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum,
any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly,
fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn't work.
Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right
before they go on to the next one. When they're done
they're done."

In a Boston Globe interview in 1969 he said:

"I don't plot my books rigidly, follow a preconceived
structure. A novel mustn't be a closed system — it's
a quest."

In a 1973 Media and Methods interview:

"The messages that come out on the typewriter are very
crude or foolish — misleading — but I know that if I spend
enough time at the typewriter the most intelligent part of
me will finally make itself known and I will be able to
decode what it is trying to talk about. It's a little like
a ouija board. I will get a clue to what my intelligence
wants to talk about and then I will try to talk about it
more and more. ... At any rate, very feeble signals, but
intelligent ones, are coming in from somewhere, and I can
refine those if I am willing to spend boring day after
boring day meditating on them and opening myself to them.
It's slow work and it's not much fun".

In 1974's The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers,
he said:

"Yeah, well there are the swoopers and there are the
bashers, and I happen to be one of the bashers. That is,
you beat your head against a wall until you break through
to page two and you break through to page three and so
forth. A lot of people write just any which way. ... But
the swooper's way, you know — and I envy them, too, because
it must be exhilarating — is to write a book any which way
in a month maybe, whack it out, and then go through it
again and again and again and again. I've never been able
to do that. I came close to doing it on THE SIRENS. THE
SIRENS was a case of automatic writing, almost. That wasn't
a bashing book because I just started and I wrote it."

--
obscura RemoveThis @null.net ¤ Q: "What targets would you consider fair game for
a satirist today?" A: "Assholes."
-- Kurt Vonnegut, 1/27/03, "In These Times"<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->