About Editing and Writing

By Jack Limpert

The writer Tracy Kidder and the editor Richard Todd met 40 years ago at The Atlantic Monthly, and this year they collaborated on a book: Good Prose – The Art of Nonfiction, described as “Stories and advice from a lifetime of writing and editing.” When they met, Todd was 32 and had been in Boston at The Atlantic Monthly for four years; Kidder was 27 and trying to write a story for the magazine about a mass murder in California. The editing-writing partnership has endured, with Kidder going from magazine articles to books—his first, with Todd as his editor, was The Soul of a New Machine, which in 1982 won the Pulitzer Prize. You come away from Good Prose feeling that you’d enjoy having lunch with either of them.

By Jack Limpert

The annual meeting of the City and Regional Magazine Association is going on this weekend in Atlanta. Here’s what editors are talking about—the sessions cover a lot of what we’ve done in the past, plus there’s discussion of current problems and how the digital revolution is forcing editors to try new things. The typical 45-year-old editor would feel comfortable in these sessions—something old, something new.

By Jack Limpert

I was always good at math and when I drifted into journalism I still liked to play with numbers. At publications where I worked, it always was a surprise that most journalists couldn’t do basic algebra. Let’s say a magazine has a 55-45 ad-edit ratio. We have 113 pages of ads sold for the June issue. How many editorial pages do we get?

By Jack Limpert

What can the editor of a news organization—a magazine, newspaper, or website—do to help writers do great stories? Which of these ten things have helped you the most? Which are of least importance?

I’m sending this to writers I’ve worked with, but welcome more feedback and suggestions. Let me know which of these are the most important and the least important to you, and add any other ways an editor can help or get in the way. Email me at jacklimpert@gmail.com.

1. Pay me enough that I feel rewarded for my best efforts.

By Jack Limpert

Sports journalism never gets the National Magazine Award recognition it deserves—after all, it’s about people playing games. But Sports Illustrated continues to be a very well-written, well-designed, well-edited magazine.

An example: The May 19 Sports Illustrated, appearing a week after the blockbuster issue featuring Jason Collins, has a great narrative piece, “Drinking, Driving and Dying,” by Thomas Lake.

By Jack Limpert

Talk about surprises: Amy Cunningham, a very good feature writer for The Washingtonian in the 1980s, someone who’d written for More, Glamour, Mademoiselle, and the Washington Post, is now a New York state licensed funeral director. She says she’s gone from an industry facing death to one that embraces it.

By Jack Limpert

An earlier post, “The Yin and Yang of Being an Editor,” focused on the warm-and-cold-blooded duality of being an editor. Most of that post was on the need for an editor to have a cold-blooded side, being decisive about how you spend money and how quick you are to swing the editorial axe. In truth, a good editor is supportive and warm-blooded most of the time, bringing out the axe only when necessary.

Beyond that, there is a lot of yin and yang in what an editor does.

By Jack Limpert

In Chinese philosophy yin and yang are opposite forces that interact to form a whole greater than either part. Looking back at  a life of editing, there was a surprising amount of this kind of duality.

Are good editors warm-blooded? Sure. When someone had a story idea that seemed promising, I tried to sit down and talk about it with the writer, making sure we both were on the same page and enthusiastic about taking it on. I always thought that mutual enthusiasm with writers, editors, designers, and everyone at the magazine was key to getting the best work out of all of us.

From an essay, Some for Glory, Some for Praise, about life as a combat pilot and writer, by James Salter:

The cynics say that if you do not write for money you are a dabbler or a fool, but this is not true. To see one’s work in print is the real desire, to have it read.

…in grammar school we had to memorize and then stand up and recite well-known poems….Language is acquired, like other things, through the act of imitating, and rhythm and elegance may come in part from poems.