Kurt Vonnegut Jr. scholars, I need your help!
I’m working on an essay, just, you know, because, and I’m only half-remembering a Vonnegut quote about the two types of writers. One of them he called “bangers” I’m pretty sure, but essentially what he was saying was that some writers mentally edit each line over and over again before they’ll let it touch the page, while others will just write-write-write then spend a lot of time on the editing process. You can’t half-quote or summarize someone in a halfway decent essay, so I turn my search over to you, sentient beings of the internets. That series of tubes. Google was unable to satisfy my search. I feel like a hologram suddenly popped out of R2D2 “Help me internet surfers, you’re my only hope.” I believe the essay was in either Palm Sunday or Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons, because I have a distinct memory of reading the quote at work at Red Oak on a break, then re-reading the essay by buslight as I bumped and jostled my way home, eastward in the darkness. But, I could’ve sworn it was Li-Young Lee who wrote “the halved-apple faces of owls” when really it was Amy Hempel. In my defense, my memory of reading that line as I walked into the Singing Hills kitchen at 5:00 to get the restaurant ready to open was indeed correct, it was merely the book that I had wrong, having read both Reasons to Live and Rose in the same week.
So if anyone happens to know the quote I’m talking about, I’ve been scouring both books and haven’t found the quote so I’m beginning to think maybe it was in an unrelated essay, or, gasp, could possibly be an entirely different author. I hope not, though, because I’ve got it in my head that it was K, and I’d hate to be wrong about that.