COMM 207: What do editors do, anyway?

"Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counseling rather than a collaborating task. The tendency of the writer-editor to collaborate is natural, but he should say to himself, How can I help this writer to say it better in his own style? and avoid How can I show him how I would write it, if it were my piece?" - James Thurber (1894-1961, humorist, cartoonist, editor and contributor, The New Yorker)

"One should fight like the devil the temptation to think well of editors. They are all, without exception - at least some of the time, incompetent or crazy." - John Gardner (1933-1982, novelist, creative writing teacher, Southern Illinois University-Carbondale)

"Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial 'we.'" - Mark Twain (1835-1910) author of "Huckleberry Finn," journalist)

There are different types of editing. One is exercised by literary editors who work with creative writers. James Thurber worked with Harold Ross, one of the 20th century's legendary literary editors, at The New Yorker. In a book called "The Years With Ross" he explained what a great editor like Ross did with his writers ... part of it was keeping writers out of trouble. Thurber:

He had a sound sense, a unique, almost intuitive perception of what was wrong with something, incomplete or out of balance, understated or over-emphasized. He reminded me of an army scout riding at the head of a troop of cavalry who suddenly raises his hand in a green and silent valley and says, "Indians," although to the ordinary eye and ear there is no faintest sign or sound of anything alarming.

But Ross did more than that. For 25 years he set the tone at the New Yorker.

Another famous literary editor was Maxwell Perkins of Charles Scribner's Sons, the book publishing company. Here's an assessment of Perkins' editorial gifts in his Wikipedia profile:

Perkins was noted for his courtesy and thoughtfulness. He also recognized skilled writing wherever he found it and nursed along writers as few editors did. That Ring Lardner has a reputation today, for example, is because Perkins saw him as more than a syndicated humorist. Perkins believed in Lardner more than the writer did in himself, and despite the failure of several earlier collections he coaxed Lardner into letting him assemble another under the title How To Write Short Stories (1924). The book sold well and, thanks to excellent reviews, established Lardner as a literary figure.

Apart from his roles as coach, friend, and promoter, Perkins was unusual among editors for the close and detailed attention he gave to books, and for what the novelist Vance Bourjaily, another of his discoveries, called his "infallible sense of structure." Although he never pretended to be an artist himself, Perkins could often see where an author ought to go more clearly than the writer did.

Perkins was also known for editing novelists Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. Most of us don't publish writers of their caliber, or New Yorker's for that matter, but we try to do something they excelled at.

Both Ross and Perkins are remembered for: (1) understanding what their writers were trying to say; and (2) bringing out the best in them. Their gift was basically a gift of empathy.

As we read this week's assignment in "Modern News Editing" by Mark Ludwig and Gene Gilmore, we'll read about editors as coaches, as team players and and as newsroom managers. But I think it all starts with slinging words around. That's what you do when you work for publications, whether they're newspapers, literary magazines, Pulitzer Prize-winning novels ... or press releases, three-fold brochures and employee newsletters.

One other thing. Both Ross and Perkins started out as newspaper reporters, Perkins for The New York Times and Ross for The New York Evening Post. Even though times have changed since the 1910s and 1920s, newspapering values and conventions are still basic to the rest of the publishing world: Something to keep in mind as you continue to read "Modern News Editing," even if you have no intention of ever going into the newspaper business!