About Editing and Writing

“Ross’s ability to detect falseness of any sort and in any form was one of his most important attributes as an editor. He was naturally drawn to what was genuine, authentic, real, true. His eye and his ear—and another sense or two that he peculiarly possessed—were affronted by a word, a phrase, a sentence, a thought, a bit of information, a line of dialogue, a short story, a piece of reporting, that was not the real thing, that was in one way or another specious, spurious, meretricious, dishonest.”

—William Shawn on Harold Ross, from Brendan Gill’s book, Here at the New Yorker

Back in December 2014 I wrote about the strange things writers will do to get the words flowing. Truman Capote wrote in bed with cigarettes and coffee handy, Graham Greene took an amphetamine twice a day, Thomas Wolfe wrote naked, Oliver Sacks went for a swim before writing. That same month, Kent Haruf, the novelist, died and these were the first and last grafs of his New York Times obit:

By Barnard Law Collier

The typewriter I loved was a Carolina blue Olivetti Lettera 22 with a shapely marine blue leather carrying case that snugly shut with a big brass zipper.

She was a generous friend, a loyal companion, an elegant beauty, a tireless worker and traveler into all but one country in South America, the Caribbean, Central America, New York City, and Washington, D.C.

I spent several hundred hours a month for about ten years alone with her; the most she demanded was tender handling and a frequent change of her red and black ribbon.

“One thing that drives me crazy, and this is especially true in newspapers, is the notion that you should take your best writer and ‘promote’ him to be an editor. This is idiotic, and it happens all the time, and nine times out of ten you lose a good writer and end up with a mediocre editor. You can no more ‘promote’ a writer to be an editor than you can ‘promote’ a plumber to be a gardener. Totally different skill sets.”

—From an interview with Charles Pierce, who often writes for Esquire, at the website of Chris Jones, also a frequent Esquire writer.
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Two totally different skill sets?

In the 1990s, when typewriters were still a part of many newsrooms, I took my old Royal to a downtown DC shop, North’s Office Machines, that advertised they sold and repaired typewriters. I asked if they did the repair work themselves.

“Yes, we do it here,” the owner said. He said, “I have two Russian immigrants. They love typewriters, and they can’t bear to see one tossed out. The only problem I have is they won’t give up on an old typewriter. I tell them it’s not worth fixing and they’ll say, ‘I can have it fixed in two days.'”

From a conversation at heleo.com between Adam Grant, an author and organizational psychologist at Wharton, and Malcolm Gladwell, an author and journalist:

Malcolm: How should this change the way we pick presidents?

Adam: Wow. We are not supposed to talk about any Wharton alums in public. [Donald Trump is a Wharton alum.] I’m going to speak in generalities here. First of all, it’s unbelievable that we have an election process that’s basically a popularity contest, instead of a competence contest. I would be willing to vote for anyone who demonstrates effective leadership skills, decision making, forecasting, visioning, conflict resolution, various points on the ideology spectrum.

Roger Rosenblatt, a wonderful writer and occasional contributor to The Washingtonian, on “How to Write Great”:

A curious line in Auden’s elegy to Yeats applies to writing great: “Teach the free man how to praise.” Auden seems to be saying that freedom, used most typically for carping and revolt, might also acknowledge that the world is worth thinking well of.

The writers we admire most are propelled by a mixture of innocence and chutzpah—the nerve to write big coupled with a childlike need to cultivate the virtues they have always believed in. They may surprise themselves by the insistence of their own higher motives and values. They may also believe that as readers, we will surprise ourselves for the same reasons.

Michaela Broyles on Twitter on July 21:

Overheard on the Myrtle Beach scanner: “We have a guy complaining he was abducted by aliens last night and that they took his blood.”
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One of my strangest lawsuits at the Washingtonian started with one of our editors coming to my office door and asking, “Did you know that Jack Kent Cooke’s chauffeur once said he had been abducted by space aliens and taken to Alpha Centauri?”

Hey, Barnum and Bailey, can you use another clown?