(no subject)

David Sedaris, on hearing some of his earlier writing quoted:

“I thought, ‘It’s too dense, and it’s trying too hard.’ ” Though his prose slips down as smoothly as a Häagen-Dazs ice cream bar, he goes through the sort of process described by John Kenneth Galbraith, who said that “I do not put that note of spontaneity that my critics like into anything but the fifth draft.”

For Mr. Sedaris that process involves at least seven drafts and a great deal of reading aloud new pieces while on tour, listening to the cadences of the sentences and noting how the audience responds: when people laugh, when they lose interest. “You realize you’re repeating yourself or being lazy,” he said.

- Sarah Lyall, in today's New York Times