DarthAnt66
Question: What were Mr. Lucas's line-edits like? Was he a tough editor?
Matthew Stover: Not tough so much as exceedingly detailed, though I suspect he would have been very tough indeed if I hadn't been quite so scrupulously faithful to the spirit of his story. I mean, he literally went over it word-by-word, even to the point of altering descriptives to adjust the characters' inflections. As I mentioned earlier, he trimmed a number of the EU references -- especially ones that harkened back to some of the older material that I'm guessing he'd rather not re-avow as part of Official Continuity, if you see what I mean. There was only one cut -- actually a series of cuts, of a continuing metaphor of which I had been particularly proud -- that surprised me (and, in fact, upset me; I don't mind telling you that this was the first time in my career that I've thrown an actual Full-Blown Diva Hissy-Fit, in a conference call with LucasBooks, howling that they go back and tell Mr. Lucas that "He just can't do this to My Book!". The funny thing was that after I had calmed down -- and survived the migraine I'd given myself -- I realized that not only was Mr. Lucas right and I was wrong (in the sense that making this series of cuts tightened the book and cleaned up the thematic arc), but that doing it his way also brought into much clearer focus a powerful moral point... and I found I had been arguing against something I actually really agreed with. Oh, it was embarrassing!
Matthew Stover: Not tough so much as exceedingly detailed, though I suspect he would have been very tough indeed if I hadn't been quite so scrupulously faithful to the spirit of his story. I mean, he literally went over it word-by-word, even to the point of altering descriptives to adjust the characters' inflections. As I mentioned earlier, he trimmed a number of the EU references -- especially ones that harkened back to some of the older material that I'm guessing he'd rather not re-avow as part of Official Continuity, if you see what I mean. There was only one cut -- actually a series of cuts, of a continuing metaphor of which I had been particularly proud -- that surprised me (and, in fact, upset me; I don't mind telling you that this was the first time in my career that I've thrown an actual Full-Blown Diva Hissy-Fit, in a conference call with LucasBooks, howling that they go back and tell Mr. Lucas that "He just can't do this to My Book!". The funny thing was that after I had calmed down -- and survived the migraine I'd given myself -- I realized that not only was Mr. Lucas right and I was wrong (in the sense that making this series of cuts tightened the book and cleaned up the thematic arc), but that doing it his way also brought into much clearer focus a powerful moral point... and I found I had been arguing against something I actually really agreed with. Oh, it was embarrassing!