"Don't think about writing. Think about typing."

A wonderful interview by Salon's Laura Miller with Robert Gottlieb, editor, head of Simon and Schuster, then Alfred A. Knopf and then the New Yorker, and now reviewer and writer:

As I've told generations of writers who have writer's block, "Don't think about writing. Think about typing."

That, for instance, is how I started my Bernhardt book. I had no plan or outline, so I forced myself to sit down and I typed: "Sarah Bernhardt was born in July or September or October of 1844. Or was it 1843? Or even 1841?" That, of course, got me into it, but it also established the tone of the book. From there on it was easy until halfway through when I found that there were two stories -- the story of her career and her art, and the story of her notorious personal life and the world's reaction to it. So I had to stop and think, how do I divide this up? Luckily I have a structural mind, which you have to have if you're an editor, but I can't structure in advance.

I suppose the thing that makes it possible for me to do this is that I just don't think of myself as a writer. I think of myself as an editor. I provide myself with the copy and then I edit it. Look: Whatever gets you through the night.

On editing

I have two metaphors for editing texts.

One is being faced with a tangle of wool. You find a loose end, then you tease all the knots out. Sometimes the text will fall happily into orderly loops with merely a tug or two; sometimes it will be a fight for every clear inch.

One other is almost more a physical feeling than a description. It's that feeling you get when you gather up a duvet and, with a deft flick of your wrist, roll it out over the bed and watch all the creases magically disappear. Disorder is transformed into a smooth expanse.

I like to ask other people what their metaphors are, and I like it when I stumble across people's metaphors, as I did this morning with Barbara Epler:

Actual editing consists so much of petting and patting beautiful writing.

With the poets, that means allowing for differences. One poet, alive like the inside of a light bulb, requires five or six sets of proofs: allow time. One might need a suggested re-jigging of the order of contents: allow possible irritation. Allow "grey" and "gray" in the same volume (the former greenish and the latter more blue: the opposite of what I'd guessed).

F*ck, I know I saw that somewhere ...

I spend more time than I like to think of fact-checking stuff online, mostly for blog posts and my radio spots.* My bad, I know - I should be using offline resources as well as online. But sometimes I'm prompted to think - who's fact-checking the fact-checkers?

Are our publishing houses and art galleries employing fact-checkers? How about the art mags? Goodness knows in the editorial work I've done it's never been made explicit to me that I need to relentlessly review every name, date, title, quote, anecdote and beyond. Certainly I've never had a piece of fact-checked writing handed back to me.

Last year in the New Yorker (sadly only the abstract is available online) John McPhee wrote an interesting account of what it's like to be a fact-checker at the magazine - a venerable role at a venerable institution. The piece started

Sara Lippincott retired as an editor at this magazine in the early nineteen-nineties, having worked in The New Yorker’s fact-checking department from 1966 until 1982. She had a passion for science. In 1973, a long piece of the writer’s called “The Curve of Binding Energy” received her full-time attention for three or four weeks and needed every minute of it. Explaining her work to an audience at a journalism school, Sara once said, “Each word in the piece that has even a shred of fact clinging to it is scrutinized, and, if passed, given the checker’s imprimatur, which consists of a tiny pencil tick.”

The pencils are obviously writ large in the fact-checker's mind: Virginia Heffernan's recent piece in the New York Times also begins with the pencils

The day I became a fact-checker at The New Yorker, I received one set of red pencils and one set of No. 2 pencils.

So I'm curious - who's got their pencils out in New Zealand?

* I was reminded this when I read two items on the same story this morning - the Guardian and the NYT on the recent discovery that the moon has shrunk (barely, and slowly - no need to freak out). The Brits said 200 metres and the Yanks 200 yards and while we're quibbling over less than 20 metres, this is science we're talking about - the discipline of exactitude, ferchrissakes.

More than just moving the commas around

One day, I would really like to write my own book. I've worked on quite a few books, and contributed to a couple, but I don't have my own yet. Thank goodness Diana Athill is my new role model, replacing Winona Ryder in Reality Bites.*

When that day comes, I'd love to work with a really great editor. While I've had some terrible editing experiences and some satisfactory experiences, I've not yet had the blow-my-mind, oh-my-god, you-mean-it-can-happen-like-that? experience. But I believe it's out there.

Anyway, the reason I was musing on this was that I came across this New Yorker column by Susan Orlean tucked away in my Instapaper files, and wanted to share it:

I could go on, about how I left Publishing House X for Publishing House Y because I was still scared of Editor F, and how at Publishing House Y I managed to get three books written there working with Editor G—who assured me that he would never leave, and this was almost true, except for a brief period when he did, in fact, leave, but then he came back—and then the head of Publisher Y got fired, and eventually I left and then Editor F left, and then I was working with Publisher Z, and then the head of Publisher Z left, and then I left Publisher Z to go back to Publisher W, because the person now running it was an old friend from the magazine world, who I knew would never leave, but you might think I was exaggerating. But I’m not.

The piece also reminded me of this piece by Gary Kamiya on Salon that I blogged about years and years ago, which I still love. And also this piece by Scott Berkun, which describes the editing relationship I hope to have:

I want to hear some tough stuff in the copyedit. How else will the book get better? A copyeditor and author shouldn’t agree on everything – the process should force the writer to think more clearly and catch bad assumptions they’ve made. I get final say, so what do I have to lose in being questioned? Better now than in book reviews.

*Female readers of a certain age will know what I mean. I hope.

Read it and weep

A recent opinion piece on Salon.com by Gary Kamiya sings the praises of editors. While the relationship between writer and editor is sometimes cast as prickly (genius vs grammar nazi; 'my precious prose' vs 'that's not actually a word') Kamiya points out that sometimes it can be mutually beneficial:

Early in my editing career I was startled when, after we had finished an edit, a crusty, hard-bitten culture writer, a woman at least twice my age, told me, "That was great -- better than sex!"

I make no such exalted claims, but there's no doubt the editing process can be an intimate and gratifying experience for both parties. Although, to pursue our somewhat dubious metaphor, there are also times when writer and editor, instead of lying back and enjoying a soothing post-fact-check cigarette, stare emptily at the ceiling and vow never to share verb tenses with anyone again.

Later in the piece, Kamiya argues that editors are even more necessary in the internet age, with content pouring online from more writers than ever before.

I agree. Writing online is different from writing for print publication.

People drop into a web page from wherever and expect to understand what's going on (imagine opening a book at random and expecting to understand what the protagonist is up to after scanning the first two lines). People read web pages - and paragraphs on pages - in a rough F shape, meaning key words need to be loaded up in the first sentences of each page and each paragraph within the page (see the heat map below). The rough guide to length is: write it, then halve it. And add some bullet points.



For all that I agree with it, you still lose some beauty. You lose passive sentences. You lose paragraphs that build to their point, not launch with it. You miss the finely-wrought sentence full of carefully crafted clauses. No one scrolls down to your pithy or poignant final sentence. "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife" becomes "Rich men needs wives" (probably 'partners', really). It's not a bad thing, necessarily - it's just a different way of using words. In some cases, I think it's important to keep the distinction.

Image: An eye-tracking 'heatmap' showing where readers' eyes fall on a webpage - red means high attention, blue little attention, grey is untouched. From Jakob Nielsen, useit.com.