Those of us who don’t write should be aware of the painstaking labour undertaken by successful writers.
It’s well known that PG Wodehouse used to mark up his type written drafts with annotations (often “not funny enough”). I have two more examples. Charles Spicer had to re-write Coffee with Hitler several times to satisfy his publisher. It is worth the effort because he transformed a PhD into an excellent book about a somewhat neglected corner of British history. Likewise Tony Scotland rewrote his new book, Undercover, at least once. It is a deeply personal account of his friendship with Milo de Talbot and, understandably, he found it easier to write about himself in the third person. He showed what he hoped was the final draft to a friend who advised him to rewrite it in the first person, which he did to good effect. You should read Undercover and if you do you will notice he slipped up once retaining the third person by mistake. The best slip up; two or three instances of the past tense slipped into Damon Runyon’s stories, possibly misprints.
The Quality of Love by Ariane Bankes is two biographies – of her mother, Celia, and her mother’s twin sister, Mamaine. They both were strikingly good looking and cut a swathe through mid 20th century literati. The pages are populated by Albert Camus, George Orwell, AJ Ayer, Arthur Koestler; friends and often lovers of Celia and Mamaine. She creates authorial objectivity by referring to her mother as Celia and not drawing attention to herself. She writes dispassionately about her mother, to whom she was close, and her aunt who was so close to her mother but who tragically died aged 38, the year before Ariane was born. Her pellucid prose allows her family’s story to speak for itself with a minimum of authorial intrusion and an absence of sentimentality. The heart of her book is drawn from letters between the sisters that she only reads after her mother’s death. She was meant to find them but her mother gave no indication of what she should do with them. I think her mother would approve of The Quality of Love.