Six Brilliant Portrayals of Editors in Film

The list, care of Word and Film.

7 Myths about Book Editing

The list, care of the Huffington Post.

From said list...

Myth #1: A good writer doesn’t need an editor.

In these days of self-publication and “service” publishers -- who take a percentage of sales for letting the author do all of the work -- you hear this a lot. “I’ve slaved over this manuscript for years. I checked it through a hundred times. Microsoft Word’s Spelling and Grammar comes up clean. It’s ready for publication.”

Want an example of a professional book from a world-class author who convinced her publishers to put out the book as-is, without a deep developmental edit (see #3 below)? Look at J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Pretty good book, and it’s sold millions of copies, absolutely -- but it’s at least a hundred pages longer than it needs to be. There’s needless repetition, uneven pacing, and side-plots that go nowhere. You’ll notice that the previous and subsequent books in the bestselling series were much shorter and much tighter. Rowling worked more closely with her editors.

Here’s the fact: if you want your book to be strong, clean, professional, and appealing, for it to affect the readers as you want it to affect them, you need to have it professionally edited. There’s never been a text written that didn’t need editing. By the time you’ve spent weeks, months, or years on a project, you can’t see the words any more. You can see the ideas -- the concepts, arguments, plot, and characters -- but not every word that’s on the page, or that isn’t, or where there are gaping holes in logic or jumps in style. An editor will. It’s what they’re paid to do.

Gordon Lish - Editing with a Butcher's Knife

20 Great Writers on the Art of Revision

The advice, care of Flavorwire.

8 Great Moments in the History of Editing

The list, care of Mental Floss.

From said list...

1. The Catch in Catch-22: The Edit That Became an Idiom

In 1961, author Joseph Heller finally submitted his manuscript for Catch-18 to his editor, Robert Gottlieb. Although Heller had spent seven years perfecting the story, Gottlieb saw room for improvement. The editor taped the pages to his office wall and restructured the novel, giving more emphasis to the now famous Major Major character and instructing Heller to delete entire 60-page sections. But most importantly, Gottlieb wanted to change the title.

Earlier that year, writer Leon Uris had released a war novel called Mila 18, and Gottlieb didn’t want any confusion between the two books. What followed was an exchange of frantic letters in which Heller and Gottlieb considered and rejected various numbers for the title. They decided 11 didn’t work because of Ocean’s 11; 14 was “an unfunny number;” and 26 just didn’t feel right. “I’ve got it!” Gottlieb blurted out one night in a eureka moment. “It’s Catch-22! It’s funnier than 18.” The edit stuck, and a major, major idiom was born.

Are Editors More Accessible Than Ever?

Yes.

From a piece on Future Book...


I can't speak for all editors, of course, and can only assume that there is truth in the assertion that many editors, particularly younger ones, "never say no". But for many editors, particularly younger ones (and as a child of the 80s I'm counting myself amongst them, despite an increasing number of grey hairs), this simply isn't the case at all. For one thing, we learned from the best; in my case as an intern for Carole Blake at Blake Friedmann and as an editorial assistant to Simon Prosser at Hamish Hamilton, who each led by example in replying to submissions promptly and courteously, with thought and care, and with an inherent respect for the work of all authors. As a result, I always aim to acknowledge submissions on the day of receipt and respond within a month, and I know many editors (of all ages) who work the same way.

I say ‘aim to' because this is absolutely the intention, but sometimes the reality falls short. And this is why: because editors today have broader roles than ever before, less administrative support than ever before, and more submissions than ever before.

What Is It Like to Edit Hustler Magazine?

Find out, here.

10 Incredibly Perfect Moments in the History of Editing

The list, care of Neatorama.

From the piece...

In 1938, Warner Brothers writer Ben Hardaway directed a short film featuring a very sneaky rabbit. The cartoon was called Porky’s Hare Hunt, but the bunny that starred in it didn’t have a name. So, the best creative minds in the business got together and dubbed the up-and-coming star “Happy Rabbit.”

Ben Hardaway, whose nickname was Bugs, also directed he next short starring Happy Rabbit. As the animators drew up early image for the film, one of them labeled a sketch of the rabbit “Bugs’ Bunny,” to make it clear that the drawing was part of Hardaway’s project. The label was mistaken for the name of the character, and soon enough, all the animators were calling Happy Rabbit “Bugs Bunny.” The tiny error created an icon, and, as they say at Warner Bros., that’s all, folks.

What Typos Mean to Book Publishing

There's more typos in more books lately. Why? What does that tell us about the publishing business?

From an article in the New York Times...

Editors I spoke to confirmed my guesses. Before digital technology unsettled both the economics and the routines of book publishing, they explained, most publishers employed battalions of full-time copy editors and proofreaders to filter out an author’s mistakes. Now, they are gone.

There is also “pressure to publish more books more quickly than ever,” an editor at a major publishing house explained. Many publishers now skip steps. “In the past, you really readied the book in several discrete stages,” Paul Elie, a senior editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, explained. “Manuscript, galley proofs, revised proofs, blue lines. You marked your changes at each stage, and then the compositor incorporated them and sent you the next stage. Now there are intermediate stages; authors will e-mail in ‘one last correction,’ or we’ll produce intermediate stages of proof — the text is fluid, in motion, and this leads to typos.”

Authors, too, bear some blame for the typo explosion. As Geoff Shandler, the editor in chief of Little, Brown and Company, told me, “Use of the word processor has resulted in a substantial decline in author discipline and attention. Manuscripts are much longer than they were 25 years ago, much more casually assembled, and beyond spell check (and not even then; and of course it will miss typos if the word is a word) it is amazing how little review seems to have occurred before the text is sent to the editor. Seriously, you have no idea how sloppy some of these things are.”

Harry Potter's Secret Copy Editor

Her name is Susan Jeffers. The State-Journal Register has more, here.

The Robotic Copy Editor

MediaBistro has more about EditMinion, here.

Twain Tales

How did a university, a press and a library create a bestseller, anyway? That bestseller being the much talked about autobiography of Mark Twain?

From a piece in the Chronicle for Higher Education...

The editor was in town to talk about the process of getting the Autobiography into the hands of Twain's still-adoring public—and to emphasize the role public money, in the form of financial support from the humanities endowment, helped play in making it happen. In a lecture chock-full of colorful Twain anecdotes—always a crowd-pleaser—Mr. Hirst described how Twain Project editors and graduate students spent the last five years sifting through and collating 5,000 pages of manuscript and trying to figure out how to organize it as Twain wanted.

A lot of that work involved discarding the less-than-tender ministrations of earlier editors. The Autobiography has never been published in full before—Twain wanted to make sure everybody mentioned in it would be long dead before it saw print—but sections of it have appeared over the years. According to Mr. Hirst, previous editors felt free to cross out, change, and censor some of what Twain wrote. The current editorial team, led by Harriet Elinor Smith and overseen by Mr. Hirst, had to sort out Twain's handwriting from that of various editors—sometimes four or five different sets of markings on a single page. "It's very hard to say that anyone's deletion of a comma is distinctive," Mr. Hirst told the audience.

William Shakespeare and Editing

Stephen Greenblatt wonders if Shakespeare ever thought twice and did drafts of his plays rather than simply write wonder and wonder without a second thought.

From a piece in the Wall Street Journal...

Shakespeare was reputed to have written with such amazing confidence—in a world of goose-quill pens and lamp-black ink—that even his first drafts were fair copies. "What he thought," the editors of the first folio wrote of him in 1621, "he uttered with that easiness, that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers." The praise of Shakespeare's supreme "easiness" clearly nettled his friend and rival playwright Ben Jonson, who was a compulsive reviser. "The Players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out line." "My answer hath been," Jonson tartly added, "would he had blotted a thousand."

The notion that Shakespeare rarely revised his work makes perfect sense. Here, after all, was a man who wrote, on average, two plays a year, acted in his own plays and those of others, penned sonnets, and helped to run a theater company, to say nothing of his many other business interests. The original manuscripts have all long disappeared, but biographers have endlessly repeated the claim that they were "unblotted." After all, where would Shakespeare have found the time for rewriting?

Apparently, however, he did find the time. A number of Shakespeare's plays survive in both the small quarto editions, inexpensively published during his lifetime, and in the first folio. Comparing versions of the same play, I and other scholars have concluded that many of the differences are probably due to Shakespeare's own obsessive fiddling. Not all of them, to be sure. In the so-called bad quarto, for example, we find "To be or not to be; ay, there's the point," which almost certainly was not an inept first try at Hamlet's words but the result of an actor's lousy memory.

Five Writers Talk about Book Editors

From the Awl...

To gain some insight into what writers should look for in editors and how best to “manage” the relationship, we asked Haven Kimmel, Calvin Baker, Emily Gould and Don Van Natta Jr. to answer some questions.

These questions were:

1. Did you have meetings with more than one editor before you sold your manuscript or book proposal? If so, what qualities did you look for in the editor when you first met? (And did these qualities turn out to be more or less important than you imagined?) How important was the editor (as opposed to say, the amount of money involved) in choosing your publisher?
2. How many revisions did your book go through with your editor? Were you generally pleased with his or her guidance? Were there moments or periods of friction or tension or frustration, where you felt that the editor was not “getting” your ideas/work, and how did you resolve? Do you have any advice in terms of knowing when and how to fight or give in, so to speak?
3. What are the most important qualities in an editor, e.g., shaping the manuscript or serving as an effective advocate in the company at large (if that was an issue)?

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis - Editor

The New York Times takes note of books highlighting Jackie's role as an editor.

From the piece...

The two books both make the point that Mrs. Onassis’s lifelong passion for reading, and her two decades in publishing, reveal much about her as a person: the intellect behind the fashion plate, the analytical mind behind the famous face. The little girl whom Mr. Kuhn describes sneaking books out of her mother’s library, and, at Miss Porter’s School, not letting her roommate, Nancy Tuckerman, interrupt her reading, grew up to spend more years as an editor than as first lady and the wife of a Greek shipping tycoon combined.

When she had lunch with Ms. Talese, Mrs. Onassis had just arrived at Viking as a consulting editor, at a weekly salary of $200. Each book recounts how in 1977, after a break with Viking’s publisher, Thomas Guinzburg, over his publication of the Jeffrey Archer assassination-plot thriller “Shall We Tell the President,” in which Edward Kennedy occupies the White House, she joined Doubleday, where Ms. Talese settled some years later. Ms. Talese’s office at Doubleday was next to that of Steve Rubin, then the publisher. “Everybody would line up outside my office waiting to see him,” she said, “and Jackie would line up just like everyone.”

In both biographies, colleagues remember Mrs. Onassis’s small office, her big glasses, and her hair smelling of cigarettes. The editorial tastes of the woman who lodged her husband’s legend in Camelot ran to cultural histories of court life, the power and mechanics of myth, biographies of unconventional women and civil rights heroes, coffee-table books celebrating past gilded ages and books on dance. She got her Martha’s Vineyard neighbor Carly Simon to write children’s books. She signed up Michael Jackson’s “Moonwalk,” which proved a headache, and a best seller.

Nine Non-Writers Who Influenced Literary History

The Huffington Post has the list, here. On it, Maxwell Perkins (pictured above).

From the piece...

Often called the most famous literary editor, Maxwell Perkins's resume speaks for itself. He was heavily involved in the development of the following: The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, The Old Man And The Sea, Cry The Beloved Country, From Here To Eternity, Look Homeward, Angel, and Of Time And The River. Perkins was a close friend of Fitzgerald's (to whom he loaned money) and Hemingway dedicated The Old Man And The Sea to him.

And, while we're discussing Mr. Perkins, there might be a movie about his life with Sean Penn in the lead role. The Los Angeles Times has more about that possibility, here.

On Online Editing

The Bygone Bureau has an interesting little piece about what goes on behind the scenes of some well-known websites, editing-wise. McSweeney's, The Morning News and The Awl are discussed.

From the piece...

Not every venerable web publication needs a dozen editors. McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, the online presence of the San Francisco-based publisher, is a two-man operation. Christopher Monks has been editing the bulk of McSweeney’s web content since 2007, and along with his predecessor John Warner, who works part-time handling the 15 recurring columnists, they are the only two on McSweeney’s staff that don’t reside in the Bay Area. (Monks is a stay-at-home dad in Boston, MA; Warner resides in Clemson, SC.)

“I upload to the site every morning right here from the MacBook on my dining room table. Usually my two bleary-eyed sons are there watching me, munching on their Golden Grahams, trying to figure out what exactly it is I do for work,” Monks said.

Monks receives roughly 200 submissions a week, which gives him quite a bit to read. But the upside is that he can be picky — almost all of the site’s content comes from unsolicited submissions — and generally, most of the accepted humor pieces don’t need much editing. Monks usually makes a few tweaks to run by the writer before the article is ready for publication. But there are exceptions.

“From time to time a piece will come in with a brilliant conceit, but not great execution, and if I think it’s worth a major overhaul I’ll work with the writer to make it fit for the site,” Monks said.

Monks communicates with writers, and his co-editor, solely by email. Warner uses Google Calendar to schedule recurring columns; Monks organizes humor content about a week in advance. His biggest technological hurdle is the software he uses to run the site, which is so antiquated that he needs to hand-code all the content, upload everything manually, and he can’t even schedule content to run on a future date — all features that are standard in modern platforms.

“The software we use to upload content is very old, like cart-and-buggy-and-men-with-hats-and-funny-mustaches old,” Monks joked.

The platform has gone largely unchanged since McSweeney’s Internet Tendency went live in 1998. (For reference, that was the year Google was launched.) Luckily, the team is in the process of creating an entirely new engine for the site, a project led by McSweeney’s digital media director Russell Quinn, who also designed the gorgeous and eccentric McSweeney’s iPhone app. When I asked if the site’s classic, Times-New-Roman-on-white look would be getting an overhaul as well, Monks said he wanted to keep it a surprise.

“The site’s new engine will probably be the biggest makeover, he said. “The site will be more user friendly, though.”

The Perils of Editing a Cookbook

The Guardian takes note of why editing a cookbook can be a recipe for chaos.

From the story...

Before I offered to edit one, I hadn't realised how complex recipe books are, or, crucially, how much washing up they involve: while producing Cook, which includes more than 250 seasonal recipes by 80 different chefs, we washed up more than 500 times (oh, how I dreamed of dishwashers). My boyfriend, photographer Steven Joyce, was commissioned to do the pictures so I naively offered our little kitchen as a location, unconcerned that most books have someone to do the shopping and food styling, someone to test the recipes and another to do the words.

Enthusiastically, we took on the lot and our home became a scene of sticky, greasy, gastronomic chaos. Our hair and clothes permanently smelled of food. For months our pillow talk was about where to get good-looking asparagus or comté cheese. We had to buy fresh ingredients every day we shot, meaning endless trips to our increasingly baffled local shops – just what were we doing with 8kg of potatoes, litres of cream and a crate of onions a week?