David Gilmour's Open Book

So even though I sold it and spent the advance I took the book down the street to Dennis Lee who is a very famous poet and a very famous editor. Among writers he's the man. And I said, "look, you don't know me. Do me a favor, just read this book. I sold it and it's going to be published in the spring. Just tell me I am making the right decision here." So Dennis phoned me up the next morning and he mumbles, "this is Dennis Lee. Do you want to have breakfast?" And I thought to myself, "oh, I am screwed, because the answer I need does not require breakfast. The answer I need is like 'yeah, it's great, away you go." He sat me down and basically said, "I think you've got something here but it's a mess. You have to throw it out and do it all over again and if you do that I'll edit it for you chapter by chapter."

I went home and thought about it and said, "I'll give up drinking for a couple of months and I'll knock this baby off in two months. I know the story; I've got a great editor." Well, it didn't work out like that. Two months later I was still on chapter three and Dennis was saying, "well, you know, I don't think you've quite got this chapter right. I think you're going to have to go home and do it again." And there's a story in Maclean's which is true, when I got to one chapter he said, it was forty pages long, and he made me write it six times until I finally said to him, "look -- you write it. You obviously know what you want here, I don't." So it took me a full year to rewrite it, then I gave it to Random House and they were of course shocked because it was a new book, and then it takes usually a year from the day you hand a book in to the time it appears. So that's where all the time went -- I had a last minute re-write of a major nature.

Kirman: So since leaving On The Arts have you basically just been completely focussed on your writing?

Gilmour: This sounds pretentious but it's the absolute truth: I've been reading Chekhov, Chekhov short stories, and I've been reading Elmore Leonard's novels,

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