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Re: Editing issues

I currently write for and edit a gardening magazine so no longer have to suffer the indignity of having the endings of my weekly garden columns chopped off by a city newspaper editor. I now get to indulge in a bit of chopping myself. But I don't whack off endings willy nilly. I'm more likely to rewrite beginnings since one of my key goals is to make a story interesting to the reader.

Sometime back in my newspaper days, I came across some "information" that changed my writing life, and while I may have the numbers wrong, it was basically that a book author had 5 minutes to get someone to buy his/her book, a magazine writer had 1 minute to get someone to continue reading a story, and a newspaper columnist had 10 seconds. I was shocked. Thus, for me, a story must above all else be interesting. The lede most of all. And if I have no confidence that the writer is going to be able to fix a boring beginning, I'll do it myself, trying to use the author's ideas and keeping the author's voice if possible. Sometimes it's astounding how a page of text can be compressed into a single paragraph.

I find myself thinking a lot about rhythm and flow and avoiding redundancy as I write my own stories and also as I edit.
Then there are the insidious grammatical bugaboos—dangling participles and pronouns that don't agree with their antecedents. There does sees to be a certain amount of sloppy writing going around. So if I can send something back to the writer, I do.But sometimes there's no time, and sometimes I truly believe I can do it better myself. I may, of course, be delusional on this last point. Carolyn Ulrich


On Monday, October 20, 2003, at 11:52 PM, Marge Talt wrote:

This thread has been most interesting to me, since I basically write
for the web and write what I want without someone changing it for any
reason. The two articles I have had published in print media turned
out to bear only a passing resemblance to what I had actually written
(and I've heard from others who have had this same experience).
Unfortunately, one of the changes made changed the meaning of what I
had written and left the readers with an erroneous impression...but,
that's beside the point.

Since most of you seem to write for print, you appear to be used to
having someone chop and dice your work; some of you appear to approve
of arbitrary cutting, whether it changes the sense of what was
written or not. Carolyn's post indicates that others of you do not
accept this with equanimity.

My question is: What do you all see as the purpose of an editor? Is
it to correct glaring errors or re-write what was submitted. If the
latter, I have to wonder why editors just don't write the material
themselves, rather than solicit (or accept) work from authors and
then make major changes to it.

Now, I'm not really talking about grammatical or punctuation errors,
but more about major changes in the way the words are put together -
which, it appears to me, is, or should be, part of why you accept or
ask a particular person to write about something, since how they use
words does reflect their view and personality. Let us assume the
given that the "author" has the ability to write in good form and an
interesting manner to begin with.

I can understand the need to make copy for newspapers fit into a
specific amount of space. I am sure that magazines have similar
issues. But, beyond fitting into a given space, why do editors feel
the need to change text to the extent that it appears they do? And,
beyond this, why, if they want to change something, don't they
discuss this with the author? It seems to be some sort of tradition
- that editors can make arbitrary changes - if this is true, where
did that start and why is it valid?

Marge Talt, zone 7 Maryland
mtalt@hort.net
Editor: Gardening in Shade
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----------
From: Carolyn Ulrich <cultivated@sbcglobal.net>

But not if the ending links the story back to the introduction and
ties > the whole thing together. Chopping off the ending leaves the
reader
hanging and makes the writer feel really embarrassed. carolyn
ulrich
On Monday, October 20, 2003, at 10:56 AM, FRIELSTER@aol.com wrote:

Chopping off the ending is what they SHOULD do. That's why
newspaper
writers
are taught "inverted pyramid" style, to get the most important
facts
out
first.


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