Guests of the Nation | Style

Guests of the Nation Style

Dialects and Writing Practices

One of the little known aspects about any writer's approach to his or her craft is the amount of attention and time that is devoted to revising and rewriting. A glance at a working copy of a poem by John Keats will show a furious crisscrossing, adding and erasing, a scratching out and rearranging of lines and text that eventually became a finished poem. For most writers, this occurs in private and once published, the final work remains stable and unchanged. Not so for Frank O'Connor. As William Maxwell said, "He rewrote and rewrote. After he was published, he rewrote and was republished. Everything he wrote was an unfinished work, not so much because of any dissatisfaction, but because of the pleasure he got out of a story. He liked his stories." As a result, there are many different versions of the same story in print. Also, as Ellmann notes,...
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