Needs a Rewrite: Great Authors’ First Draft Revisions

“Moby Dick”
Herman Melville

“Call me the whale guy a hansom cab Steve Ishmael.”


“The Old Man and the Sea”
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)

John Blumemthal's next novel THE STRANGE COURTSHIP OF ABIGAIL BIRD will be published by Regal House in October 2019.


“Trees”
Joyce Kilmer

“I think that I shall never see/ A sandwich rhyming bunch of words poem as big lovely as a woman’s breasts bush ficus pea flea tree.” (Note to self: Do I really want to write about a tree? Why not a duck? What rhymes with duck?)



“The Trial”
Franz Kafka

“Someone must have slandered Joey Jay Josef K. for one morning, without having done anything truly embarrassing wrong, he was handcuffed to a radiator arrested for mooning a fishmonger.” (Note: This will never sell.)


“Mrs. Dalloway”
Virginia Woolf

“Mrs. Dalloway said she would swipe strip for buy the chafing dish sled cookies flowers herself.”



“The Bell Jar”
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”
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.”

John Blumemthal's next novel THE STRANGE COURTSHIP OF ABIGAIL BIRD will be published by Regal House in October 2019.