Quote:
Originally Posted by mogui
Heinlein was awesome. He only wrote one draft and that was the final copy. Not many can do that. Somehow he created a very comfortable ambiance in his books. I wish he could have lived forever.
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Oh, it wasn't quite that simple. Heinlein got edited like anyone else, and had to submit revised drafts. There was a batch of "unabridged" reissues of his work a few years back, publishing his original manuscripts instead of the edited versions that had previously been printed. For the most part, the changes were a word here or a line there, in the sort of line editing any capable editor does to tighten a book and streamline the prose. There were only a couple of significant changes, such as the original manuscript of Podkayne of Mars having Poddy dying at the end. The editor insisted on her living, feeling Poddy's death would be too downbeat for the Juvenile/YA audience the book was intended for. Heinlein complied, but under protest, as he felt that undercut the point he was trying to make.
And Stranger in a Strange Land was written over a period of years, with various false starts and revisions as RAH struggled to clarify the story he wished to tell and the proper form for telling it.
The author I think of as "First draft is submission draft" was the late Isaac Asimov, who was a human prose machine with an uncanny ability to research a complex subject and spit it out again as a clear explanation for the layman.
I met Heinlein, and was privileged to know Isaac. I miss both of them.
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Dennis