There are American “literary” agencies that promise to publish your poetry for a fee as well — along with all the other aspiring housewife poets. And those who offer to “mechanically edit” your book — which would be fine if they showed some literary flair or even comprehension of your book. But imagine if all the sentences were transformed into somebody’s idea of a grammatically correct form. Perhaps words could also be looked up and replaced with other words more known by everybody. I imagine that would produce a product suitable for American housewives. But not literature. Sometimes a word that the subconscious throws in, which is a malapropism, actually turns out to be an even better word than the one originally intended. I pondered long and hard and left such a word in one of my books — because it really does do the job ten times better than a more conventional word I may have had a mind.
Retain control, use skill rather than mechanics, and always watch out who you are dealing with.
No comments:
Post a Comment