About Editing and Writing

—From a Tom Robbins essay that appears in the book, How I Write: The Secret Lives of Authors, published by Rizzoli International Publications.

For years, a homemade poster has hung above my writing desk. I suppose I made it to serve both as a reminder of certain important truths and as a kind of greeting, like the inscription on the Statue of Liberty, welcoming the nervous exile into a strange new land (in my case, the land of fictive prose that I’ve entered each morning as if for the first time).

The poster, if it can  be called that, contains two quotations from writers. . .

From a Wall Street Journal story, “The Missing Piece of Amazon’s New York Debacle: the Burn Book,” by Jimmy Vielkind and Ann Katie Holmes:

When Amazon scrubbed plans to build a second headquarters in New York City earlier this year, the reason appeared rooted in a debate about unions, tax subsidies and housing costs.

Then there was the burn book.

By Barnard Law Collier

Columnist Peggy Noonan said “I miss the tough, crazy beat reporters of yore.”

For almost two years Jimmy Breslin and I sat at adjoining battered, cigarette-scarred desks in a corner of the New York Herald Tribune newsroom on Manhattan.

When the newsroom cleared out after eight p.m. we searched together for the right words and eccentric ideas that remained in hiding. We discussed and compared the personalities and characters he covered on his “beat” in the demi-monde of The Other Four Burroughs, and I covered the romantic dangers of Latin players in South and Central America. Our badinage made way for some earthy and dramatic reportage that found its way onto the breakfast tables of Trib readers.

We had one of our old journalists lunches last week in Washington. We have a good time at these lunches, telling stories about our lives in journalism and talking politics, books, and sports.

We understand we were lucky. We think we had journalism’s best years—from the 1960s until the digital revolution capsized the business 10 years ago.

We enjoyed relative stability—we were given the time and money to do good work. We had bosses and readers who were interested in both timely news and great long-form stories.

As the Atlantic expands its focus to compete more directly with outlets like Politico, Axios and even the Washington Post and the New York Times, some staffers say it has proven difficult to re-engineer the newsroom.

“It felt like the place was becoming a hot-take factory,” said one recently departed writer. “That can be profitable, of course, because hot takes don’t cost much.”

—From a story, “The Atlantic, Propped Up by Laurene Powell Jobs, Charts New Course,” by Lukas I. Alpert in the Wall Street Journal.

From a story, “The People Have Spoken, and Rice Takes Offense,” by Sarah Lyall in the New York Times:

Lestat, the vampire narrator of Anne Rice’s most recent book, “Blood Canticle,” begins the novel with a harangue against its readers. “What the hell happened when I gave you ‘Memnoch the Devil?”‘ he asks crossly, referring to an earlier novel by Ms. Rice that some readers, to put it mildly, did not like. “You complained!”

Many people did not care much for “Blood Canticle” (Knopf) either, as Ms. Rice found to her mounting horror when she began scrolling through dozens of virulently negative reviews of the book on Amazon.com.

Peggy Noonan brings New York tabloid reporter Mike McAlary (1957-1998) back to life in this from her Wall Street Journal column “A Tabloid Legend on Jeffrey Epstein’s Death”:

If Epstein killed himself, he chose the time he knew the guards were asleep. If Epstein was murdered, his killer chose the time he knew the guards were asleep. Incompetence is completely believable but insufficient.

The papers are doing their stories about those strange Americans with their quirky ways burning up the internet with their quaint conspiracies. But who would not wonder about foul play? With all the people who’d want him dead?

From The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers, a book by Maxwell King, published by Abrams Press:

In his office at Esquire magazine in Manhattan, Tom Junod was working on a profile of Fred Rogers for a special 1998 issue on “new American heroes.” A self-described “bad-boy journalist” who had cultivated a reputation for controversy, Junod was uncomfortable about tackling such a goody-goody, and wasn’t sure how to approach the article.

Robert Stone in 2010.

From a Paris Review interview with Robert Stone, author of The Hall of Mirrors, Dog Soldiers, and other novels:

Q. Is writing easy for you? Does it flow smoothly?

A. It’s goddamn hard. Nobody really cares whether you do it or not. You have to make yourself do it. I’m very lazy and I suffer as a result. Of course, when it’s going well there’s nothing in the world like it. But it’s also very lonely. If you do something you’re really pleased with, you’re in the crazy position of being exhilarated all by yourself.

8/22/19 update:

The Atlantic offers its subscribers this deal by mail: “Get a free gift subscription when you renew today.” The annual cover price, the offer says, is $179.90. Your renewal rate is $59.99. Savings on renewal 83%. Give one free gift sub. Claim your 2-for-1 offer by 8/31/2019.

So the offer is two subs for $59.99.

A same day Atlantic offer by email: One year for $24.95. “It includes ten issues, Our IOS app and Android edition, Professionally narrated audio articles, Digital library with 25+ back issues, ebooks, and more.”