Saturday, July 28, 2007

To Simplify and Enlarge

Annie Dillard was on NPR this morning, talking about her new novel The Maytrees. Apparently it went from 1200 pages down to 200 in the process of revision. She said her primary goal in revision is to "simplify and enlarge." I *love* that idea. How it is important not just to make the story (sentence, poem, paragraph . . .) shorter, but to simultaneously make it bigger, in its impact, its resonance, its universality.


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