a blog by Jack Limpert, Editor of The Washingtonian for more than 40 years.
From The Writer’s Almanac:
It’s the birthday of American novelist and short-story writer Elizabeth McCracken, born in Boston in 1966. McCracken spent her childhood immersed in world record and reference books, which influenced her later decision to earn a master’s in library science. She was an indifferent student in high school and it wasn’t until college, when she took a playwriting course with Derek Walcott, that writing really took hold of her.
From a Washington Post story by Jay Mathews headlined “Why don’t schools embrace editing? Let’s sneak it in.”:
By Jack Limpert
Ron Charles, fiction editor in the Washington Post’s book section, once sent out this tweet: “Editor friend tells me a daily section is easier than a weekly section because you can’t lie awake *every* night, but you can once a week.”
I sent his tweet on to Richard Babcock, an editor who spent years editing at weekly—New York—and a monthly—Chicago—with some daily newspaper experience thrown in. Here was his reaction:
From a lithub.com interview with novelist Walter Mosley:
Walter Mosley’s The Awkward Black Man is available now, so we asked him some questions about audience, interviews, and writing advice.
Who do you most wish would read your book?
I once explained my audience by saying that I imagined being on a train or a bus sitting side by side with my favorite older cousin, Alberta Jackson. I’d be telling her stories about Easy Rawlins or his murderous friend Mouse. She’d be all excited and worried about Easy.
How Barton Swaim wraps up his Wall Street Journal review of Bob Woodward’s new book Rage:
I confess I have always liked Mr. Woodward’s White House chronicles. High-ranking officials of both parties are apt to blab to him, mostly I suspect because he allows them to speak without attribution. I find it easy to ignore the author’s consensus-liberal interpretations of events and enjoy the books for what they are: aggrieved cabinet officials and senior White House staffers anonymously grousing about each other and portraying themselves as martyrs. . . .
By Jack Limpert
While working as a magazine editor, I had a sentence typed on a small square of paper and tacked up on the bulletin board near my desk:
Death ends a life, but it does not end a relationship, which struggles on in the survivor’s mind toward some resolution, some clear meaning, which it perhaps never finds.
It’s spoken at the beginning of the play, I Never Sang for My Father. A middle-aged son is returning home to see his father, a difficult man nearing the end of his life, and the son is giving the audience a sense of what’s coming.
Robert J. Samuelson says he’s retiring from writing his Washington Post column about economics—after, he estimates, about two million words.
He began writing for The Washingtonian 47 years ago and if I remember right he got around the city on a bicycle, carried a backpack, and didn’t dress at all like the Harvard graduate he was. He was known as “Sam,” not “Robert or Bob.” And he was very smart and a clear writer.
In November 1974 he wrote a big Washingtonian piece—The Economic Establishment—and in the editor’s note about him he said “I am no relation to economist Paul Samuelson—although the confusion is more embarrassing to him than to me.”
From Robert J. Samuelson’s column in today’s Washington Post headlined “Goodbye, readers, and good luck—you’ll need it. What 50 years of writing about economics has taught me.”:
Dear Readers,
It’s time to quit. Since coming to Washington in 1969 as a young reporter, I have written, by my crude calculation, about 2 million words, most of them columns for The Post, Newsweek and the National Journal. Some years ago, I promised myself that I wouldn’t overstay my welcome: I would not continue my column simply because I could. I’m almost 75. If I haven’t yet said what’s on my mind, I never will.
By Jack Limpert
A columnist who tries to help you
understand the tough stuff.
Most of the Washington Post op-ed columnists have been at it a long time and it’s tempting to skip over their columns because their liberal or conservative biases are well-established and you’re inclined to think you know what they’re going to say.
The exception is Robert J. Samuelson, who started covering economics for the Post in 1969, joined the National Journal in 1976, wrote a column for Newsweek from 1984 to 2011, and has long been a Washington Post syndicated columnist.
By Jack Limpert
T.S. Eliot once said, “An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better.”
Why did Eliot, working as an editor in 1944, reject the book Animal Farm, a satirical look at communism, that went on to sell more than 10 million copies? Wikipedia, quoting the Times of London, says: “During the Second World War, it became clear to Orwell that anti-Soviet literature was not something which most major publishing houses would touch — including his regular publisher Gollancz. He also submitted the manuscript to Faber and Faber, where the poet T. S. Eliot rejected it; Eliot wrote back to Orwell praising the book’s ‘good writing’ and ‘fundamental integrity’, but declared that they would only accept it for publication if they had some sympathy for the viewpoint, which I take to be generally Trotskyite.’”
