Editors Writing

    Glimpsing the above words, a true editor would perhaps rewrite the heading to be "Editors AND Writing."  And  a strong writer would counter that the wording be left alone.  For some reason there's recently been a spate of editors jumping into the fray of publishing their own books.  Avid Reader just came out (I haven't read it yet but do have it ordered), a memoir of editor Robert Gottlieb who the New York Times described this way: Robert Gottlieb, the celebrated editor at Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf and The New Yorker, was a pale, bookish, sensitive, rumpled and vaguely mousy young man.  His first father-in-law, a roofing contractor, took a look at him and said, “If I had a son like that, I’d take him out and drown him like a sick kitten.”  But he went on to edit the works of  "Toni Morrison, Robert Caro, Lauren Bacall, Salman Rushdie, Janet Malcolm, John le Carré, Katharine Graham and Mr. Clinton, among many others."  And then there's The Accidental Life by editor Terry McDonell; he went on to edit the works Edward Abbey, Peter Matthiessen, Tom McGuane, Hunter Thompson, Kurt Vonnegut and more.  Add to this the movie Genius (which I would rate as one of my top five films I've seen this year) about editor Max Perkins of Schribner's and the list continues to grow.  What drives these people?  Their stories are all fascinating...the writers they've happened to edit even more so.

    It is a common saying that those who cannot write...edit.  And almost every editor knows this saying, although many of them are actually quite good in their writings; but it is the converse that is likely even more true, that most writers could not be editors.  It is a special skill to walk that line between what an author wants to convey and what a reader wants to read, and often the two plains don't mix.  An easier way to picture this would be with a coach viewing hundreds if not thousands of talented children, teens and adults, and yet recognizing that perhaps only a few have that truly special talent to become professional, and that even fewer will be able to climb onto the small podium at the top of the pyramid.  Same with music and most any other field (it took one such producer to tell the folk and acoustic-playing duo, Simon & Garfunkle, that they should add an electric guitar and drums midway through their song, Sounds of Silence, a change that catapulted them out of the small dingy nightclub genre and onto the commercial scene).  It's not that the talent isn't there; but often the person --the one to spot that talent early and develop it and get the person to listen and to adapt and to fine-tune his or her abilities-- that person is the rare one.

   I love to edit; perhaps this came about because of a blow dealt to me when in my younger days.  I was  confident and with a few published articles under my belt, I felt that I could jump right onto the best-selling novel scene by pounding out a few quick chapters and still feel quite good about this rather unique story line I was creating (all writers seem to think that way).  Amazingly, I somehow got a quick face-to-face scheduled appointment with one of the editors at Warner Books (a big publishing arm at the time), an editor who apparently read my chapters and bounced it down to his assistant's assistant, and a few weeks later there I sat, excitedly waiting to hear that they were going to tell me that this was quite likely the best opening chapters they had ever read.  But instead here's what I was told..."I've read better."  And that was that, no additional words, no apology, just my pages quietly but firmly handed back to me (this was in the days of actually typing out hard pages of your manuscript) thus casting me from the lofty building (and my lofty dreams of fame and fortune) and back onto the suddenly now-chilly streets of Manhattan.  Ouch.  We've all suffered those blows, that stomping and cracking of our ego shells and the crushing of our bubbles. But from the other side, editors have to be the ones to make those decisions and to do that over and over, perhaps destroying promising careers by not knowing how their words of rejection will be taken.  It now becomes up to the singer or writer or mechanic or woman or gay person or whoever to decide what step to take next, to brush it off and rebuild that inner foundation brick by brick or to change direction or to jump out of the building (surprisingly, the latter result has apparently happened to more editors than it did to writers).

   Editor Terry McDonell discovered this when he was asked to start the magazine Outside and requested a piece from Tom McGuane.  "You probably don't want anything about hunting," McGuane told him (McDonell didn't).  Instead McDonell answered, write "...whatever you want to write about."  So McGuane wrote an opening that began with this: Hunting season in your own back yard becomes with time, if you love hunting, less and less expeditionary.  This year, when Montana's eager frosts knocked my garden on its butt, the hoe seemed more like the rifle than it ever had before, the vegetables more like game.  My son and I went scouting before the season and saw some antelope in the high plains foothills of the Absaroka Range.  Could he add the word "hunting" in front of the word "season," asked McDonell, make it more clear for the readers.  "I wrote it on purpose," Tom said.  "Well..." said McDonell, I knew that, of course, but had never thought much about writers' intentions.  I was proud of making quick decisions about ledes.  I could work through my reasoning -- something about telling the readers where you're taking them, getting right to it, whatever it happened to be.  But what if I was unthinkingly undermining the ambition of the writer?  That set me straight.  An editor could do nothing worse.  McDonell's realization proved correct when McGuane wrote more about a lot of things, the outdoors, fishing and of people discussing depression (...gnawing the topic of their own malaise like dogs on a beef knuckle.  My experience of it was a disinclination to speak at all.  I had the feeling of being locked in a very small and unpleasant room with no certainty of exit, and I recall thinking that it was the sickest you could possibly be and that my flesh had been changed to plaster.  My business at the time was flight from expectations.  As McDonell wrote in his memoir, That's not writing you edit.

   When people such as editors and coaches and producers discover such talent, they are perhaps even more excited than the people being discovered for when can see that chunk of stone they can also see that sculpture so raw and trapped inside, to paraphrase Michelangelo.  Not all will follow their advice (for as with any field, not all editors and coaches and producers are talented either), and some will carve their own path.  But every now and then you will read or hear that acknowledgement that it was a nudge or push from a person in the background, a person who guided them along while still giving them their own space.  Of course we're all editors of sorts, finishing a movie or a book and if not satisfied perhaps saying, "now here's how I would have done it," or something similar.  But sometimes its a bit more complicated than that.  As we go through life we all edit our choices, making decisions that we think --at least at the time-- are the right ones.  And generally, we get better as we go along, jumping back and forth from editor to writer to reader.  Perhaps now we're discovering that we were meant to read this all in a new way, to read this "book of life" from each of those viewpoints and to enjoy them all.  Hats off to the editor and writer and reader in each of us.