Lewis Lapham The Art of Editing No. 4

Since Auerbach’s measure of stylistic maturity values writing to the extent that it penetrates through local and individual human purpose to historicist truth, he naturally discounts the individual purposes of writers as impediments to the representation of truth. The more a writer includes and the less he selects according to his own purpose, the

the essence of the process is revision.

After four to six weeks of sessions, he’s produced 200 to 300 pages. He prints them out, reads them, and asks himself, “What am I saying here? What’s useful to me? What’s useful to other people? What’s crap?”