Draft No. 4

deceiving researcher after researcher down through the ages, all of whom will make new errors on the strength of the original errors, and so on and on into an exponential explosion of errata.”

You are working on a first draft and small wonder you’re unhappy. If you lack confidence in setting one word after another and sense that you are stuck in a place from which you will never be set free, if you feel sure that you will never make it and were not cut out to do this, if your prose seems stillborn and you completely lack confidence, you

I had little else to do but show up for cocktails at five in the evening.

the essence of the process is revision.

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

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.

The worst checking error is calling people dead who are not dead. In the words of Joshua Hersh, “It really annoys them.” Sara remembers a reader in a nursing home who read in The New Yorker that he was “the late” reader in the nursing home. He wrote demanding a correction. The New Yorker, in its next issue, of course complied, inadvertently doublin

Writing is selection,

Chauffeurs are good for about six months, he said. For two months, they are learning to work for you. Then for two months they are excellent. Then they start to steal from you, and two months later you fire them.