Needs a Rewrite:
Great Authors' First Draft Revisions
by John
Blumenthal
“Moby Dick”
by Herman Melville
“Call me the
whale guy Steve Ishmael.”
~*~*~*~
“The Old Man and
the Sea” by Ernest Hemingway
“He was an old man
who smelled like garlic
played the harmonica fished
alone in a bathtub dinner
jacket skiff in the Gulfstream and he
had gone eighty-four days now without
taking a nap bath
dump fish.” (Note
to self: My agent will hate this. The hell with
him. He’s a wimp)
~*~*~*~
“Pride and
Prejudice” by Jane Austen
“It is a truth universally
acknowledged, that a monkish
loser snotty simpering
bore like Mr. Darcy single man
in possession of nice piece of change
big you know what good
fortune, must be in want of a smart
accountant wife. Or
not.”
~*~*~*~
“Trees” by
Joyce Kilmer
“I think that I
shall never see/ A sandwich rhyming
bunch of words poem as uninspiring big
lovely as a woman’s
breasts large plant pea
flea tree.” (Note
to self: Do I really want to write about a tree?
Why not a duck? What rhymes with duck?)
~*~*~*~
“Romeo and
Juliet” by William Shakespeare
“But soft what really
bright thing light through pretty
far away place yonder glass
thing that you look through window
which needs putty shatters busts breaks?
It is the east and Hortense
Julia is the yellowish round thing
above sun and the stars
and several planets and other bright stuff in the
sky.”
~*~*~*~
“Mrs.
Dalloway” by Virginia Woolf
“Mrs. Dalloway said
she would steal swipe
strip for buy the chafing
dish sled cookies
flowers herself.”
~*~*~*~
“The
Stranger” by Albert Camus
“Mother bit
the dust bought the farm
died after clipping her toenails
last Friday today.”
~*~*~*~
“A Tale of Two
Cities” by Charles Dickens
“It was a
pretty good day the best of
times it was actually
not such a good day the worst of
times, it was the age of good
thinking smartness wisdom,
it was the age of wearing
clown shoes foolishness, it was
the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of
Incredulity, it was the season of light, it
was the season of what happens
when you turn off the lights darkness,
it was the spring of hope, it was the time
when it snows winter, of
whining a lot despair. “(Note
to self: Is this too many seasons?)
~*~*~*~
“The Bell
Jar” by Sylvia Plath
“It was a clear,
sultry summer, the summer
they plugged in fried
electrocuted the toaster oven
washer dryer Rosenbergs
and I didn’t know what I was doing
in my kitchen my
tutu Cleveland New
York.”
~*~*~*~
“The Great
Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald
“In my younger and
more vulnerable years my dry
cleaner father gave me some crackers oatmeal dumb
platitudes advice that I’ve
been turning over in my mind ever since Zelda
stopped drinking my hamster
died.”
~*~*~*~
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