COMM 207: What do editors do, anyway?

Editor's note (yep, writing editor's notes is something else editors do): I put this post up on the blog last week, but skipped over it until we got into Chapter 4 on editing as a management function. Today, we'll start by going back through the reading and seeing how much of the discussion compares an editor to a coach or a manager ... i.e. someone that brings out the best in the other people who work for a publication and helps them work together as a team. Then we'll look for some of the same things in the websites linked below. - pe

"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 that isn't discussed in our textbook is exercised by literary editors who work with creative writers. Let's start today's class by going back through the text and refreshing our memory on Chapter 4. Then we'll read a piece called "Zen & the Art of Editing" by freelance book editor Terri Windling of New York City. She begins:

In my years as a fiction editor, I have rarely met anyone outside of the publishing industry itself who has any real idea what it is that I do for a living. My own mother was convinced that I spent my days correcting other people's spelling and punctuation, and she couldn't fathom how a daughter who'd brought home Fs on spelling tests had ended up with that job.

Part of the confusion derives from the term itself, since the word "editing" can apply to several different jobs within the book publishing field alone (and we won't even go into film or newspaper editing here). ...

And so on ... Windling also has links to a couple of articles that are worth surfing. One is in The Guardian, a British broadsheet newspaper, and one is in the online magazine Salon.com. While we're looking at all these things, let's notice how they're edited. There's a lot of variety in the industry.

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!