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This Kenyon Review essay takes on a lot of subjects: Rejection letters, marriage proposals, small magazines, honesty. It is the best written thing I've read today, and almost certainly the best written thing you'll read today, and you shouldn't take the fact that I'm quoting from it as an excuse not to read it. It's a true pleasure. But I do want to quote this bit on editors, because most of you out there only deal with writers, or think you do, and in any case you only know to thank writers. But the editors are behind all the articles, behind the ideas as much as the prose, and the difference between what they get in and what they give out is often all the difference in the world. Indeed, as often than not, what you're reading was given to you by the editor than by the writer. And editors don't get the glory, or the byline, or the chance to appear on TV. They just love the product, and need to pay their rent. So, unappreciated editors, this one's for you:
My friend James and I have for years now plotted a vast essay about editing, an essay we may never write because we have children and paramours and jobs and books to write, but we take great glee in sketching it out, because there are hundreds of subtle joys and crimes of editing, and editing is hardly ever what the non-inky world thinks it is, which is copyediting, which is merely the very last and easiest piece of editing—rather like a crossword puzzle, something you can do near-naked and beer in hand. Real editing means staying in touch with lots of writers, and poking them on a fairly regular basis about what they are writing and reading and thinking and obsessing about and what they have always wanted to write but haven’t, and also it means sending brief friendly notes to lots of writers you have never worked with yet in hopes that you will, and also it means listening to lots and lots of people about lots and lots of ideas, some or all of which might wend their way into your pages, and it means being hip to the zeitgeist enough to mostly ignore it, and it means reading your brains out, and it means always having your antennae up for what you might excerpt or borrow or steal, and it means tinkering with pieces of writing to make them lean and taut and clear, and always having a small room open in the back of your head where you mix and match pieces to see if they have any zest or magnetism together, and it means developing a third eye for cool paintings and photographs and drawings and sculptures and carvings that might elevate your pages, and writing captions and credits and titles and subheads and contents pages, and negotiating with and calming the publisher, and fawning at the feet of the mailing manager, and wheedling assistants and associates, and paying essayists more than poets on principle, and soliciting letters to the editor, and avoiding conferences and seminars, and sending the printer excellent bottles of wine on every holiday, including Ramadan and Kwanzaa, just in case.[...]My friend James has a lovely phrase for the joy of actually editing a piece: mechanic’s delight, he calls it, and I know whereof he speaks, for I have sipped of that cup with a deep and inarticulate pleasure. I have been down in the engine room of very fine writers’ minds, my fingers following the snick and slide of their ideas into sentences. I have worked like hercules to clean and repair a flawed piece and bring out the song fenced round by muddle. I have distilled vast wanderings into brief journeys. I have snarled with delight to discover a writer deliberately leaving a fat paragraph for me to cut, a gift he confessed with a grin. I have said no to the great when they were fulsome and yes to the unknown when they were stunning. Many times I have said yes when I should have said no, for all sorts of reasons, some of them good, and more times than I know I said no when I should have said yes.(Via Sullivan.)
