Are Editors On the Endangered Species List?

By Jen Leo | Permalink | 1 comment | August 9th, 2005 | Trackback

If you needed a good editor, could you find one? Big thanks to Raj for alerting us to this article from The Observer.

“Black day for the blue pencil,” by an unknown author. (I went to credit the author and it’s not even attached to the online article. Shame.)

I loved the part that described Thomas Wolfe’s writing process and how his editor at Scribner, Maxwell Perkins, handled him. Oh to be the man that can’t stop writing, eh? Basically Wolfe handed in a gargantuan piece of work which, after Perkin’s help, became Of Time and the River.

They began working together, two hours a day, six days a week - then nights, from 8.30 onwards; then Sunday nights as well. It was like painting the Forth Bridge. Wolfe would be asked for a short linking paragraph - and return a few days later with 10,000 words. In the end, while Wolfe was out of town for a few days, Perkins had the typescript set - all 450,000 words. It was published as Of Time and the River, and though another of Perkins’s authors, Hemingway, said it was “something over 60 per cent shit”, it became a bestseller. Wolfe later wrote an account of its composition, “the ten thousand fittings, changings, triumphs and surrenders that went into the making of a book”.

And while we’re on the subject of edting, check out “Tara Weaver: Interview with a Developmental Book Editor,” if you haven’t already seen it.

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