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You look for an ending
Editing is a tough task, and many editors unequal to it. At least in my experience.
I’ve worked with a variety of editors in a range of publications, from free tabloids to daily papers to tony lifestyle magazines. I prefer the editors at the dailies, I think. They don’t mess with the writing much. They don’t have time. Your piece gets assigned to you, you send it in, it gets vetted for length, grammar, style, and libel, and it gets printed. If your writing stinks when you send it in it stinks on the printed page, unless they find something better to swap in.
Magazine editors are different. They see it as their job to make the writing better. This is not inherently a bad idea, much of the time. Even the best work by the most talented writer could benefit from having a dispassionate eye turned on it. And the vast majority of the writing with which editors work is not, to put it mildly, the best work of the best writers. As it is difficult to land a job as an editor unless one is at least a mediocre to passable writer, most editors — aside from those in the upper echelons of publications with healthy budgets — spend most of their time working with absurdly mixed metaphors, incomplete statements, tooth-grindingly bad cliche written by people less skilled than the editors themselves.
And so the editors become accustomed to rolling up their sleeves and fixing things. They get so used to it that many of them think that they’re not doing their jobs unless they fix things. This need to fix things becomes independent of the existence, or lack, of anything in the writing that needs fixing.
There is, in the general field my writing tends to occupy, a prestigious and pretty magazine which out of a healthy regard for future potential income I will not here identify. The magazine prints some of the best-known writers in the field. Getting column inch real estate in this mag is widely regarded as a coup in my genre, providing a measure of immediate name recognition among the coffee-table ecorati. I’ve spoken to a few of the pub’s editorial staff, and each of them has said — with not a little not-very-well-hidden pride — that “we make our writers work.”
That’s all well and good when it comes to research, chasing down interview subjects, meeting deadlines and requests for a rewrite if necessary. But what these folks meant, it turns out, is that they make “their writers” turn out rewrites even when it isn’t necessary. They actually meant this as a point of pride, that they put themselves, and their writers, through unnecessary work. One friend who wrote for them a few years back, a notable environmental writer, was asked for four complete rewrites of his article. When asked for a fifth rewrite that would essentially have restored his originally submitted draft, he withdrew the piece from consideration.
That’s almost preferable to the practices of most magazine editors, though: at least the Prestigious Rag has the writer do her own surgery. Most editors wade in with the machete on their own. If they do not actually introduce egregious errors into the piece, you are lucky. That happens more often than you might think. More commonly, they make what seem pointless changes. Swapping an “and” for an “as well as,” for instance, and then changing the “as well as” in the subsequent sentence to an “and.” God forbid the writer uses a rhetorical trope like repetition for emphasis, or antimetabole or chiasmus, for they will rewrite it to read “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask whether you might owe your country something.” They will lard lean sentences with useless information, which phenomenon Ron refers to as “how much does the bridge weigh?” (Long story.) They will interrupt strings of alliteration with dependent clauses. They will violate the music.
In short, they will take writing from any of a hundred disparate sources and make each piece sound as if the same mediocre writer was responsible for it. Whole volumes of magazines, years’ worth of issues, every piece sounding as if it were written by the same committee.
I have never seen the point, myself. Thankfully, I am not the only editor who feels this way. A writer’s voice is a precious thing. Over the last two decades I’ve spent editing writing from the insufficient to the sublime I have cuisinarted precisely one piece in such fashion, and it needed it and I had no other text to fill the hole for which it was slotted, and I pledged never to work with that writer again.
I have rarely had a budget to pay writers, and I am a rather demanding reader, and I still have had more occasion than I can tell you to run articles in nearly the state in which the first draft was delivered. Sometimes a piece just comes in ready for press. Why on earth would any editor in his or her right mind alter a comma that didn’t need altering?
And the same approach, on a fractal level anyway, pays off with writers who aren’t as practiced, or who were not quite as diligent in preparing the piece. It is almost never necessary to go in and futz word by word. If a stretch of text is awkward, it is almost never necessary to the piece: the awkwardness usually comes from the writer’s not knowing what to say about that paragraph’s subject. If the problem can’t be fixed by changing a key word or making a bent sentence whole, excision is almost always sufficient, whether you’re looking at a dependent clause or a whole chapter.
An advantage of this method is that removal is less jarring to the writer than is turning awkward stretches into something else. The writer will recognize writing that is not her own, but often won’t miss what you’ve taken out.
This is even true for the first and last paragraphs of a work, despite the common position in the newspaper biz that one does not change a first paragraph overmuch. This is called “messing with the lede” and it is done only when unavoidable. But new writers often write buried ledes: it’s as if they take a couple paragraphs’ worth of warming up the fingers, knuckle-cracking, before they start writing the real piece. When I work with a piece that starts out awkward or vague, one of the first things I do is look for a good starting paragraph halfway down the page.
And likewise at the far end. Having built up a head of steam, many writers go on past the point where they ought to have stopped. What follows is usually redundant, often trite, sometimes even condescending to the reader in that it hammers home conclusions that are obvious.
A good piece of writing is like a good life. It should have a point. It should be at least moderately interesting. And when it is time for it to end, it should end: dragging it out benefits no one. You are given material with which to work. You figure out what the point is. You make it as graceful as possible. When the point of the material has been fulfilled, you look for an ending.
You look for an ending, and it is almost always obvious where that ending should be, and though the unpracticed often feel the urge to soften it, a good ending is of necessity abrupt.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Note: A database glitch in 2008 ate a bunch of archived comments. Don't be offended if yours isn't here, or confused if the conversation seems disjointed. Thanks!
Or.
When you’re copyediting a piece, and there’s some misleading statement of fact in it, and you say,
“Hold on; that’s not right. Fetal development goes this way, not that way. If you have a ‘hormone surge’—which isn’t quite what happens either when you’re talking about hormone mimics that prevent a hormone surge—at a few weeks past sperm-meets-ovum, it doesn’t turn the embryo into a ‘girl’ exactly; it turns the embryo into a feminized XY who won’t grow ovaries and will be therefore sterile and there’s a population bomb here for this minority group that you haven’t begun to notice,”
and the Ubereditor says, “Huh? But I’ve seen this Grauniad story from three sources and why haven’t any of them said that?”* and “We’re talking to a general audience here; they won’t understand what you’re going on about,”**
and you realize after a few go-rounds that you’re the only one in the room that has even a clue about fetal development in humans and that you’re also the only one who isn’t thinking “gender” or some such construct when you’re talking about biological sex differentiation
and that half the problem is that you’re also apparently the only one there who gets it that there are more questions to be asked about development and WTF the writer of original news item was talking about—or that the mistake is a result of bad editing of the ignorant-compression sort possible repeated over several iterations and it wasn’t the original writer’s fault at all—
and you start to thing This Is What’s Wrong With Science Reporting In This Country And Several Others
and you start questioning yourself about whether there are ever any exceptions to what you’re saying, that hormone disruptions will not result in an embryo/fetus/baby with ovaries instead of testes
and it’s almost quitting time anyway and you’re tired
and you’ve already made certain decisions after being loudly and misguidedly chided for Insufficient Niceness
...
Ya know? You’re right. Half the editors I know, and I include myself in the raw total, should be sat upon.
And. Trees. Same principle. if it shows, you’ve fucked up.
*Because the pieces were written by science writers who don’t know any more than you do, of course.
*Therefore you owe them the courtesy of not telling them anything that’s not factual, dammit.
By: By Ron Sullivan on 2007 10 28
I try to end most posts several seconds earlier than I want to. I’m usually pleased with that, in retrospect.
By: By Megan on 2007 10 28
I had a weird experience in my first editing job, a ski resort seasonal magazine. I assigned a story to a local lady writer, something like “100 Exciting Things to Do Outdoors.”
I told her I was looking for action, burning adventure, local excitement – Hiking under the full moon! Horseback riding in a lightning storm! Star gazing from a natural hot spring! Mountain biking down the face of Mammoth Mountain!
She took three weeks to write it, bumping me up against our deadline, and when it came in, it was all:
12. Lean against a Jeffrey Pine with a mug of herb tea and compose a poem to the slanting rays of the sun.
36. Sit quietly and listen to the birds.
65. Take a stroll through your back yard and count the different types of plants.
I’d probably enjoy a number of those things today, but in an article aimed at 20-somethings, it was a nonstarter. I had to rewrite it totally - I think a single phrase of hers survived in the final piece.
The really strange thing was, she came in for the check, which was okay, but when I made a small effort to deal with the discrepancy between her article and what we printed, she appeared to not even know what I was talking about. It was like she couldn’t tell.
...
Mostly, I’ve had good experiences with editors. Few of them have failed to improve the stories I’ve turned in.
One exception was a little human-interest corker of a story I accidentally uncovered and did a short piece on for the local paper.
Cy Welch came up to our little mountain town in central California to go fishing for a week. On the third day, he came into town for supplies, and stopped at the post office to send his wife in Southern California a postcard. He told her about the weather and the fishing, and signed it with love. The postcard was delivered ... nearly 50 years after. It had fallen behind a counter in the post office, and was found only decades later, when the post office was relocating to new digs. Being the post office, they delivered it to the address.
You can imagine that if you tell that story one way, with a build up, then a surprising little zinger at the end, it would be most fun to read. And that’s how I wrote it, a short piece about 200 words long.
The editor turned it into a straight news story: “A postcard mailed locally by Canoga Park resident Cy Welch 50 years ago was lost by the postal service. Welch and his wife, the addressee, are both now dead, but the card was recently received by John Smith of Canoga Park. A postal service representative explained that the card had been found behind a counter in the midst of a move. The card carried a two-cent stamp.”
Reading it was like watching someone carefully and meticulously, over several minutes, stomp a butterfly.
When I went in to ask about it: “Why did you rewrite that story as straight news? You didn’t like the quirky human interest buildup-and-punchline version?” ... again, it was like he had no idea what I was talking about.
By: By Hank Fox on 2007 10 29
A resounding yes to what you say here. I’ve been copyediting nonfiction, mostly freelance, for 25 years - probably more than 400 books. My three cardinal rules are: Don’t make any change that you couldn’t cite a documented reason for (i.e., stay away from just-don’t-like-the-way-it-sounds changes). Remember that it’s the author’s book, not mine. And have the gumption to do very little - to tell the publisher “This writer was generally careful and correct and clearly knew what she wanted to say, so I made few changes.”
I’ve got a file full of notes from grateful, surprised authors who have encountered the other kind of editor.
This is not to say that I haven’t run into books in which virtually every sentence needed help. Many people who write books are experts at something other than writing. But it’s obvious whether an author knows how to write and does it carefully, or not.
It’s tricky when the author does something that violates the “rules,” but I suspect it’s intentional - when I know that some readers and possibly my employer will think it’s a mistake (and the editor missed it). In those cases I don’t change it, but point out to the author the risk he runs (it’s his book ...).
By: By Lin B on 2007 10 29
Hi this is a bit late but wanted to write and thank you for all the recent photos of the last week or so on the blog, the meet up, the smoke blowing over the ocean and lastly adorable little Thistle. Not sure about that Luddite road…there could be any number of places to go there….
By: By Linda on 2007 10 29
The differences in issues, questions, approaches, and attitudes between editing journalism and non-fiction/science writing vs. poetry, literary fiction, plays etc are so interesting to me.
I think many of the fundamentals of good editing are the same - ie: begin and end with ‘my job, editing someone else’s work, is to strengthen THEIR intentions, not impose my own’ - and that the arrogant forgetting of this, often born of bitterness and frustrated hopes for one’s own writing career, is an equal risk in both milieus.
Coming from the latter group of arts-type writers and editors/teachers, my bias/arrogance tends to be that if someone can collect a bunch of facts but doesn’t care two whits about writing skill and craft, I don’t even call them a ‘writer.’ One can practice the verb without being the noun: filling column space does not equal art. Slamming together a formulaic sit-com script by committee does not equal ‘writing.’ The capacity to learn how to make effectively manipulative marketing copy does not equal ‘talent.’
I often feel like on the web, these things are blurred (to the great detriment of writers who DO care about craft), and I often wonder if the people talking about ‘writing’ on the web (blogs, mainly) have ever read novels or poetry or any other extremely carefully crafted art. Often, it seems the template in mind for ‘good writing’ is the Insta-Book on the Issue of the Day.
Anyway, another rant/point of view. :)
Nice post, Chris. Always glad when people get to thinking about how writing is actually made, and how they relate to it, and why.
By: By Theriomorph on 2007 10 29
This is even true for the first and last paragraphs of a work, despite the common position in the newspaper biz that one does not change a first paragraph overmuch. This is called “messing with the lede” and it is done only when unavoidable. But new writers often write buried ledes: it’s as if they take a couple paragraphs’ worth of warming up the fingers, knuckle-cracking, before they start writing the real piece. When I work with a piece that starts out awkward or vague, one of the first things I do is look for a good starting paragraph halfway down the page.
And likewise at the far end. Having built up a head of steam, many writers go on past the point where they ought to have stopped. What follows is usually redundant, often trite, sometimes even condescending to the reader in that it hammers home conclusions that are obvious.
A good piece of writing is like a good life. It should have a point. It should be at least moderately interesting. And when it is time for it to end, it should end: dragging it out benefits no one. You are given material with which to work. You figure out what the point is. You make it as graceful as possible. When the point of the material has been fulfilled, you look for an ending.
You look for an ending, and it is almost always obvious where that ending should be, and though the unpracticed often feel the urge to soften it, a good ending is of necessity abrupt.
I think I need to print this out and give it to my students. Although - joy of joys! - it looks like the papers that came in today are actually starting off with the point, instead of the paragraph of warm-up meandering. *makes fist-pump*
By: By Rachel Shaw on 2007 10 29
instead of the paragraph of warm-up meandering.
I blame the five-paragraph essay.
By: By Chris Clarke on 2007 10 29
This is called “messing with the lede”
Incidentally, I’m not sure why I indulged in verisimilitude softening last night when I wrote this, but I ought to say that most news editors I’ve worked with actually use a verb significantly more pointed than “messing.” At least on deadline.
By: By Chris Clarke on 2007 10 29
Argh, the five-paragraph essay! DIE DIE DIE!
Thankfully, I’ve managed to pummel this out of them, largely through the expedient of making them write focused essays on enormous topics - there’s no room to “mess” around when you’ve only got 2-3 pages to work with, and you’re trying to make an argument about something like, oh, the significance of first contact.
Yeah, I’m rather evil that way. I call it the Deep End of the Pool approach; it gets you swimming rather quickly.
(Let’s not get me started on things like the non-use of the first person singular, the narrative-in-place-of-argument, the 2-page paragraph, or the giant quotation of doom. I’d be ranting all day.)
By: By Rachel Shaw on 2007 10 29
I’m editing in a somewhat different context, I suspect: I’m copyediting and cold-proofing books, manuals, and supporting materials for people like electricians and fire fighters and instructors of those people, so I haven’t expected a lot from the writing. I focus on subject-verb agreement, missing or misplaced commas, and following the stylesheet for whatever the organization wants. I do admit to killing off passive constructions whenever I can get away with it, but proofing (rather than copyediting) makes that a little dicier. Every so often I find something that’s egregious, but it’s often too late for me to do anything about it except slap on a post-it note to the production editor.
On the other hand, I’ve also been editing a dissertation proposal for a client, and her writing is appallingly bad. In that case, I’ve waded in, machete in hand. Unfortunately, I’ve done a sufficiently good job for her that she wants me to do her dissertation, too (**shudder**).
By: By narya on 2007 10 29
ack! narya, back away from the dissertation. that way lies doom.
By: By kathy a on 2007 10 29
Getting column inch real estate in this mag is widely regarded as a coup in my genre
You mean Orion? His sword’s too short. No wonder he’s a little testy.
By: By Dave on 2007 10 29
The one time an editor really pissed me off was when I had used the Latin term “per anum” (it was about turtles, OK?), and somebody at the Press changed it to the nonsensical (in context) “per annum”...AFTER I had corrected the proofs.
Editors! ptui!!
By: By Sven DiMilo on 2007 10 29
It should be noted that (which is to say, I’m going to bring this up), that “burying the lede” has become standard practice for journalists covering the current Administration. Anyone who wishes to test this should look to any story in a major newspaper from 2002-2006 and skip to the second-to-last paragraph of the story. That paragraph will, in all likelihood, contradict or undermine the story’s headline and first paragraph. It will also be the only paragraph in the story that carries factual information. Everything else will be a quote from someone who is lying.
On an entirely separate note, I’ll mention that my idea of writer hell is to have someone say, “This needs work,” or “Not quite right” without specifying any specific problem. This tends to happen more in technical writing type situations rather than magazine/newspaper situations, but it should be grounds for justifiable homicide.
By: By James Killus on 2007 10 29
You may be amused, Sven, to learn that one magazine (which did an otherwise stellar job of editing my piece, aside from inexplicably adding vowels to correctly spelled words such as “color” and “labor”) changed a reference to insects so that they were described as belonging to “the anthropod phylum.”
That may have been a typo, I suppose. Are R and N next to one another on British keyboards? Maybe somewhere near the key for the “ou” ligature?
By: By Chris Clarke on 2007 10 29
“the anthropod phylum” Love it. Of course, now I can’t shake the disconcerting image of a cockroach with human feet…
“help….me…”
By: By Sven DiMilo on 2007 10 30
=v= My writing’s too eco-ratty for the ecorati.
By: By Jym Dyer on 2007 10 30
Reading it was like watching someone carefully and meticulously, over several minutes, stomp a butterfly.
“Stomp a butterfly” deserves to become a cliché, on the tip of everyone’s tongue for 15 famous minutes.
By: By black dog barking on 2007 10 30
i have known a young man named E. for a very long time, since he was 4. in second grade, i was an art-project mom in the classroom, on the very day that the class released the butterflies that the children had nurtured from pups. everyone was very excited, especially E. the class all cheered and danced around as the butterflies took flight; all except for the one with a malformed wing.
E. was completely devastated when he discovered that he had stomped on the last little butterfly, the one who could not fly. his grief and guilt flowed with his tears. the teacher reminded everyone that the one butterfly was born with a bad wing, and to their great credit, his classmates told him it was not his fault. a proper funeral was hastily arranged within minutes, with heartfelt eulogies from everyone who was moved to speak. “he was a good butterfly, and we are sorry he could not fly,” was the general theme.
By: By kathy a on 2007 10 30
“the anthropod phylum” Love it. Of course, now I can’t shake the disconcerting image of a cockroach with human feet…
“help….me…”
“he was a good butterfly, and we are sorry he could not fly,”
Why are these so funny? Because they are…
Dave - that was my first thought, too.
By: By Rachel Shaw on 2007 10 31
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