Good Prose (21 page)

How do people find their way into this business? I was once on a panel with another editor, who said the most extraordinary
thing. Asked why she went into publishing, she said, “Well, I just really like writers.”

Imagine liking writers! I mean liking writers as a class of people. Safecrackers or jugglers or dental hygienists, sure—but writers? Writers are by nature narcissists. In the clinical sense, that is, not the commonplace sense of “egotists.” (They can be egotists too, but only once have I fallen asleep while listening to a writer on the telephone.) In a way, they have to be narcissists, at least while they are working. To maintain the concentration and self-belief necessary to see one’s project as preeminently worthy generally requires a distorted sense of reality. It’s as if you are required to think your work more important than it is in order to make it seem important at all. Perspective, a balanced view of life, is a virtue that tends to make one into agreeable company, but it can be death to a writer in the midst of a book.

Editing is a wifely trade. This is a disquieting thought for editors, certainly for male editors, and in a different way for some female editors too, but editing does involve those skills that are stereotypically female: listening, supporting, intuiting. And, like wives, editors are given to irony and indirection. When male editors become bullies it may be because they resent their feminized role. (They shouldn’t take it out on writers. They need other avenues for their manly impulses, skydiving, Formula One racing, something.) However hesitant, timid, and self-doubting writers feel, they nonetheless remain the stereotypically male figures in the relationship, whatever their gender. Writers assert. Editors react.

Editors and writers need each other. Ultimately editors need
writers more than the reverse, which is a wise thing for editors to keep in mind.

I have played both parts. I’ve been a writing editor—narcissist or helpmeet, depending on the day of the week. All editors take heart from T. S. Eliot’s observation: “Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.” To write can have a good or a bad influence on your editing. Being edited makes you more sensitive to the ways in which the editorial hand, so innocuous seeming when you are wielding it, can cause pain. On the other hand, if you think of yourself as a writer, you may too easily imagine that the answer to another writer’s problem is your own fine prose.

Most of my writing (and a lot of my editing) has been done for magazines. I have worked for a couple of brilliant magazine editors whose genius lay not so much in editing line by line, but in conception and boldness—a willingness to trust the writer and to be surprised (even at the cost of surprising advertisers). The ordinary magazine experience, by contrast, can be dreary. The remark one doesn’t want to hear from a magazine editor is, “We love your piece. We just have a few suggestions.” This often means a total rewrite, and one they have already undertaken to do.

Editors, in any medium, should avoid rewriting, and if they do try to rewrite, then the writer is justified in resisting. Revision by an editor never works as well as when the writer does the work. If editors do add words, they should try to maintain the author’s style and idiom, in the spirit of those signs you used to see at dry cleaners: “invisible reweaving.” The surest way to do harm to a piece of writing is to impose one’s own style on it.

Editors need a hierarchical sense of a manuscript, book, or article. They need to see its structure, its totality, before they become involved in minutiae. A writer should be on the alert when an editor starts by fixing commas or suggesting little cuts when the real problem resides at the level of organization or strategy or point of view. Most problems in writing are structural, even on the scale of the page. Something isn’t flowing properly. The logic or the dramatic logic is off. Editors ideally can hear and see prose in a way that the writer cannot. And to notice may be enough, preferable to trying to fix it oneself. Sometimes you need only write “tone” next to a problematic passage for the author to hear it afresh and realize that it is sounding a sour note.

A sense of hierarchy is all the more necessary in editing because writers, too, want to concentrate on the little things. Writers, especially students, will sometimes say, “I can’t wait until you mark up my manuscript.” This sounds, as it’s meant to sound, open and flexible. But I usually feel a bit trapped, even manipulated by this kind of remark. To take your pencil to a manuscript is to endorse it, to say it just needs “some fixes,” when in fact it is just as likely to need rethinking altogether. I want to say, and sometimes do say, “Well, let’s see if it’s ready to be marked up.”

Kidder, along with many writers, claims that the first draft is the hardest. I have never fully understood this. The first draft is the occasion to scatter all your bright notions on the page, without the awful limitations of finality, the facing-it recognition that what you’ve got is all there is. But perhaps it is a matter of the strictures you place on yourself, a matter of what you mean
by a first draft. If it is more than an elaboration of notes, if it struggles for sequentiality, then yes, draft one can make you quail. Kidder, in one of the many head games he plays upon himself, has a capacity to pretend that his first draft is his final draft even though another part of his mind knows full well that it will be altered greatly, maybe even discarded.

Kidder has accused me of disingenuousness for always praising a first draft. It’s true that initial praise is almost a reflex for me. But praise of the imperfect need not be insincere. In fact, it can sometimes be more sincere than the writer realizes, sincere in a different way. I may like not what I see but what I imagine. You have to envision the potential of a piece of writing, and potential can sometimes be more exciting than reality. Emily Dickinson’s line “I dwell in possibility, a fairer house than prose” is an editor’s motto.

No writer known to me revises so energetically and even enthusiastically as Kidder. It is a great gift to be able to consider your own work—hard wrought—as thoroughly provisional. Of the things we have learned in revising, perhaps the most important is the concept of sacrifice. Sometimes passages, even chapters, characters, or themes, that are perfectly good in themselves must go for the good of the whole.

All good writing ultimately is a contest with the inexpressible. Every good passage leaves something unsaid. So it ought to be hard. But you don’t want to make it harder than necessary. The best thing an editor can do is to help the writer to think, and this is the most satisfying part of an editor’s work, collaborating at the level of structure and idea.

The process that Kidder and I have worked out over the years
has been a source of great comfort—for both of us, I think. The ritual of the final read-aloud has a particular significance. I know this is not a universal practice among writers and editors, and for understandable reasons. One approaches it with some apprehension. It is inevitably chastening. The writer cannot hide from the sound of his own voice, and writer and editor alike must encounter mistakes that have lurked in plain view all along, now suddenly blatant and full of reproach. And satisfying as it is to correct them at last, you know that some other blunder remains undiscovered. All books are imperfect. John Updike once wrote about his lifelong pleasure in receiving the first copy of a book of his from the publisher, a pleasure, he said, that lasts until you find the first typo. At some point in our proceedings Kidder will likely invoke Melville: “This whole book is draught—nay but the draught of a draught.” And I may then chime in with my own favorite line from that passage: “God keep me from ever completing anything.”

In the long course of a book and the longer course of a career, we have disagreed and even nettled each other from time to time (and done some eye rolling in private). But we have never exchanged an angry word. It helps, I suppose, that we were both raised to be polite. But we have also had our well-established roles.

Only recently have we experimented in reversing them.

Late in our association, after we had been working together for about thirty-five years, I wrote
The Thing Itself
, which claimed to be cultural criticism. It was that, but as it got closer to the end it became increasingly personal, part essay, part memoir. I gave Kidder the manuscript for his comments. He returned it a few
days later, and I opened it to see his bold hand—large and legible, completely unlike the squiggly marks I tend to make—marching through the pages, leaving various messages, none of them wanting in candor. His most memorable advice was “Shit-can this.” I was fully recovered within three weeks.

Subtler instruction did occur. For instance, I had written about something of which I had been “absurdly proud,” something that it would have been absurd to be proud of, in fact. Kidder had circled “absurdly.” I stared, then got it. I had been begging for the reader’s sympathy. The adverb was asking forgiveness for what the adjective confessed. Out went “absurdly,” and the sentence was stronger for it.

But it was not until we were deep into the present book that I felt the full otherworldly power of role reversal. Kidder was trying to cajole me into a piece of work, and he cited Keats’s advice to Shelley on avoiding excesses: “Curb your magnanimity,” wrote the tactful Keats. I had the opposite problem, in Kidder’s view: stinginess. He was trying to make me flesh out a typically underdone paragraph of mine. “Unleash your magnanimity,” he said.

Oh brother. It had come to this. One had heard oneself.

In 1859 Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “Never use the word
development
. Dangerous words in like kind are
display, improvement, peruse, circumstances …
”

Those words have survived the great man’s scorn—though he was probably right about “peruse.” Every generation has its verbal fashions and critics who deplore them. Some usages, seemingly poisonous, get absorbed harmlessly into the language; others die out. A century after Emerson, many were alarmed by the spread of “finalize,” but that epidemic subsided, and the word doesn’t seem to cause much concern when it appears today. About the same time, “hopefully” (as in, “Hopefully, things will get better”) sent critics into merry indignation. Strunk and White sniffed, “It is not merely wrong, it is silly.” William Zinsser called it an “atrocity.” It was said to be grammatically incorrect, a “misplaced modifier.” In fact, in its disputed usage, “hopefully” serves as a sentence adverb, a word modifying an entire sentence, not necessarily the word it precedes. It functions no differently from “seriously,” or “frankly.” The unacknowledged objection to “hopefully” was social, a matter of taste. Sophisticated people just didn’t like the sound of what was then a new usage, especially since unsophisticated people were using it
with such apparent pleasure. Today, probably because of the opprobrium heaped on it, fewer people seem to use “hopefully,” and even fewer seem to care.

It is tempting to despise all neologisms, but many of them simply reflect the constancy of change in the world. Here is a sentence from the news in 2011 that couldn’t have been understood ten years earlier: “Christopher Lee, a second-term Republican from upstate New York, resigned after a disclosure by a Web site,
Gawker.com
, that he had sent embarrassing photographs and misrepresented himself to a woman he contacted through Craigslist.” You can mourn for a world where companies were once named like mighty ships. Now they take names that sound like bath toys, such as Yahoo! or YouTube, but that’s what they’re called, and there’s no way around it. To Google has entered the language, and it’s precious to surround the word with ironic quotation marks.

English changes constantly. No sensible person would want it otherwise. But even if they do it silently, all writers and most readers simmer with distaste for certain words and phrases. We do this even as we acknowledge that today’s outrage is tomorrow’s shrug. Here are some usages, circa 2012, that we would happily expunge from the language.