Draft No. 4

“Every block of stone has a statue inside it, and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.”

The sex life of citrus is spectacular. Plant a lime seed and up comes a kumquat, or, with equal odds, a Seville orange, not to mention a rough lemon or a tangerine.

She mailed the marked-up copy to Harold Ross, the founding editor, and Ross was said to have bellowed. What he bellowed was “Find this bitch and hire her!”

I had written Corps’ for each and every possessive Corps, and the copy editors said that the possessive of Corps should be printed as Corps’s. I thought I was in a morgue. I said so. The copy editors phalanxed—me versus the whole department.

Keep a legal pad, or something like one, and when you are stuck dead at any time—blocked to paralysis by an inability to set one word upon another—get away from the computer, lie down somewhere with pencil and pad, and think it over. This can do wonders at any point in a piece and is especially helpful when you have written nothing at all.

He had an alert look and manner; short, graying dark hair; a clear gaze, no hint of guile—an appealing, trusting guy.

“I’m just taking away what doesn’t belong there.”

an instantly likable guy if the instant had not been this one.

Once captured, words have to be dealt with. You have to trim them and straighten them to make them transliterate from the fuzziness of speech to the clarity of print.

Developing a structure is seldom that simple. Almost always there is considerable tension between chronology and theme, and chronology traditionally wins.