COMM 353: Week of March 6-8 -- some thoughts and links on editing, an opportunity to express yourself in writing and a start on the week's assignments

I know a writer who refuses to let a word of his prose be altered. You’ve never heard of him. It’s a shame. His small press books would sell much better if he would.

I also know a best-selling author of Civil War historical novels who recently released his third book. I came up to him at a literary festival and blurted out, “You’re brilliant!” He blushed. “Shucks,” he said, “my editor made me cut out 200 pages.”

-- Charles J. Shields, "The Editor of the Breakfast Table" Qtd. in About.com

Editing for publication is about more than grammar, punctuation, spelling and the nits we used to pick in freshman English. As Carol Saller suggests in her "Subversive Copy Editor," it's about relationships. Writers' relationships with their readers. With other writers. With all the other people involved in getting a publication on the street (or up on the World Wide Web). A good editor mediates those relationships, helps the writers relate to all those proofreaders, layout people, compositors, typesetters and -- foremost and always -- all those readers.

It's about correct grammar and mechanics, too, but they're just part of a much larger picture. A very useful tip sheet on magazine editing at eHow.com lists seven steps in getting an article ready for publication. The first: "Read the article. Re-read the article if time allows. ... Follow your instincts to determine whether this article will be attractive to your readership and, in turn, help increase magazine sales." Notice it's about sales? We're in a commercial world when we write for magazines (or edit them), so we do pay attention to the bottom line.

The second point deals with the tone and flow of a piece. With the third, we finally get to grammar, word choice and spelling ... but even then, eHow counsels, "... be careful not to take away the meaning of that passage. The goal is to make the article more interesting and easier to read." The fourth through the seventh steps are about copyfitting, fact checking, layout and, yes, another roud of editing at the copy desk for "checking for errors in grammar, spelling, statistical or factual errors." Taken together, they're a good summary of the editorial process at most magazines. Let's follow this link and together read the eHow tip sheet. How do these steps build on each other and fit together into a smooth editorial process?

Linked below are several Web pages about editing listed in a directory of writing tips about Editors and Editing on the About.com Grammar & Composition Web site. Before surfing around and finding some advice you find useful, here are a couple I like:

• Lilian Ross, a longtime writer for The New Yorker, once said (in an often-quoted passage picked up by About.com:
  

  A helpful editor should have the following qualities: understanding of and sympathy for writers; the editorial talent to recognize and appreciate journalistic and literary talent; an openness to all kinds of such talent; confidence and strength in his own judgment; resistance to fads and fakery in publishing; resistance to corruption and opportunism, to exhortations from people, including writers and other editors, who are concerned with "popularity" and "the market"; moral and mental strength, and the physical strength to sustain these; energy and resourcefulness in helping writers discover what they should write about; literally unlimited patience with selfishness and egotism; the generosity and character required to give away his own creativity and pour it into a group of greedy and usually ungrateful writers.

  On the seventh day, presumably, the helpful editor rests.
  
  
• Ross' quote is worth thinking about even though (or because!) it reminds me of what Stanley Walker, a famous city editor at the old New York Herald-Tribune, said in 1924 about newspapering:
  

  What makes a good newspaperman? The answer is easy. He knows everything. He is aware not only of what goes on in the world today, but his brain is a repository of the wisdom of the ages. He is not only handsome, but he has the physical strength which enables him to perform great feats of energy. He can go for nights on end without sleep. He dresses well and talks with charm. Men admire him; women adore him; tycoons and statesmen are willing to share their secrets with him. He hates lies and meanness and sham, but he keeps his temper. He is loyal to his paper and to what he looks upon as the profession; whether it is a profession, or merely a craft, he resents attempts to debase it. When he dies, a lot of people are sorry, and some of them remember him for several days.

  
  
  
• Maxwell Perkins was a great literary editor of the same period as Lillian Ross and Stanley Walker. Perkins shepherded novels by Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe into print for Scribners. There's not a lot about him on the World Wide Web, other than a few orphaned quotes on one of those websites that collect Famous Quotes and Authors My favorite: "Just get it down on paper, and then we'll see what to do with it." A nice summary of Perkins' philosophy of editing in an article article on Perkins by John Walsh, of the London Independent, when a biopic of the famous editor was announced in 2010. It's worth quoting at length:
  

  He did not, as some people imagine, rewrite the works of his starry charges; instead he gave them advice on structure, selection and where their creative instincts were taking them. Oddly, for an editor, he was sloppy about punctuation, spelling and proof-reading. His letters were written in a slapdash tirade of half-connected thoughts, linked by commas and plus signs. This, for instance, to Hemingway: "I'm glad you're going to write some stories. All you have to do is to follow your own judgement, or instinct + disregard what is said, + convey the absolute bottom quality of each person, situation + thing. Isn't that simple!!... I can get pretty depressed but even at worst I still believe... that the utterly real thing in writing is the only thing that counts + the whole racket melts down before it. All you have to do is trust yourself."

  According to Holywood Reporter, Sean Penn was being considered for the role of Perkins' character, by the way. That was in the summer of 2010. Nothing heard of it since then.

Now it's your turn: Open up the About.com directory, surf around the pages that are links to it. Don't omit the ones from newspapers. (Have you noticed, by the way, how many of these old geezers had newspaper backgrounds? You're probably aware your editing instructor is an old geezer with a newspaper background, too. What kind of writing gig in today's world is comparable to newspapering in my day?) Now that I've shared with you some of the wisdom I like, share with us the pearls you find as you surf through the linked pages. Quote a couple. Quote them, with an identifying signal phrase, so we know where you got them.

Focus on answering these questions: WHAT MAKES A GOOD EDITOR GOOD? WAS HAROLD ROSS A GOOD EDITOR?

Post your comments to your blogs and send me a link (if you haven't done so already).

For the rest of the week, i.e. the rest of today's class and Thursday's, here's what's in the syllabus:

Week 8 (March 6-8)
• Reading: Thurber, 121-154. How did the New Yorker’s editorial product change from the “roaring 20s” to the Great Depression, World War II and beyond? How did Ross change? Or did he?Keep following the New Yorker’s website at http://www.newyorker.com/.
• Writing: Keep blogging. What insights from the long-ago historical periods that Thurber writes about can offer you guidance for the second decade of the 21st century?
• Editing: [Keep doing what we're doing. It's getting about time to have copy in more-or-less final form and start dummying the publication. What's it going to look like? I feel like we're on schedule so far, but we've also got spring break coming up. And then Easter. So we want to make sure time doesn't get away from us. Just sayin'.]