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September 29, 2005
Random observations
I just got an advance copy of The Ballet Companion. My positive opinion from the galleys is confirmed; it's a good trustworthy reference and Eliza should be very proud. The dance professionals I have shown it to have been extremely impressed and want to purchase it for their school or recommend it to students and parents. I'm proud of my contribution to it, not that I always remember correctly what that was. I looked at a few sections and thought "I didn't write that", then looked at my drafts and found out that, no, I had - at least in initial draft. There's very little I wrote that went into the book as is, but that is to the good. Still, I've written so much over the past few years that I'm starting to not remember what I've written after another 40-50 thousand words have passed in the interim.
There was only one thing that I immediately and correctly thought "I didn't write that." - a single "indisputably" in the section on Balanchine. I didn't have a problem with Eliza's assertion (a case can be certainly made for Balanchine being the best choreographer of the 20th Century, especially on this side of the Atlantic), but I'm a cover-your-ass kind of writer and to me, writing "indisputably" is like taping a sign to your book that says "DISPUTE ME". Also, especially after a year where I've tried to concentrate on Ashton as well as Balanchine, I'm less interested in who's top dog. It doesn't matter.
The book tightened my writing and it made me notice the rhetorical constructions I use on the first draft that need to be combed out when editing. "Really", "actually", "in fact", "I think that" or "in the end" don't contribute to the thought; they're leftovers from the thought process. Writing weekly for Danceview Times continued the tightening process. Ballet Review isn't laissez-faire about copy; they edit the most rigorously of the places for which I have written. But it's a quarterly and Alexandra's background is The Washington Post. Newspaper writing is less leisurely and more muscular. I was finishing the article on the Royal Ballet for B-R this week and started trying to put together a "lede" - something I never thought about before writing for DVT. I didn't do a lede; the article is a 4000 word piece about several performances. A punchy intro wouldn't have fit the same way it does in a 700-1200 word piece about a single performance.
Posted by Leigh Witchel at September 29, 2005 2:51 PM
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Comments
ledes...
I know what you mean.
Posted by: sandi at October 1, 2005 1:40 AM