“Then it takes you longer than it does most people, doesn’t it?”
“I cannot say as to that. Everybody revises.”
“Why, when I write a letter, if I go over it I always scratch out so much that I have to do it over.”
“That’s the idea, exactly,” I replied. “I go over it until there isn’t a thing to be scratched out, or a word to be changed.”
“But you’ve got lots left,” she said, enviously. “When I go over a letter there’s hardly anything left.”
Innumerable questions followed these, but at last she had her curiosity partially satisfied and turned away from me. I trust, however, that I shall some day meet her again, for she too is “a novelty!”
The mechanical part of a book is a source of great wonder to the uninitiated. My galley proofs were once passed around among the guests at a summer hotel as if they were some new strange animal. They did not understand page proofs nor plates, nor how I could ever know when it was right.
The cover is frequently commented upon as a thing of beauty (which with my publishers it always is), and I am asked if I did it. I am always sorry that I do not know enough to do covers, so I have to explain that an artist does that—that I often do not see it until the first copies come from the bindery, and that I am of such small importance that I am not often consulted in relation to the matter—being merely the poor worm who wrote the book.
There are many people who seem to be afraid to talk before me lest their pearly utterances be transformed into copy. Time and time again I have heard this: “We must be very careful what we say now, or Miss —— will put us into a book!”
People are strangely literal. An author gets no credit whatever for inventive faculty—his characters and stories are supposedly real people and real things. I am asked how I came to know so much about such and such a thing. I once wrote a love story with an unhappy ending and it was at once assumed that I had been disappointed in love!