Thanks for your reply a few weeks ago. Timely and meaningful. I will have to put it up there with an email I received from Abraham Verghese (one of my doc-writer heroes) years ago during residency. I was training in Houston and he was working in San Antonio at the time. I asked for his advice on taking time off to get an MFA and to my surprise and delight the guy emailed me back. I’ll never forget his opening, “Patrick-seriously consider depression. I remember feeling abject despair during my own residency…make no major decisions now.” It’s so funny looking back how right he was, even as a stranger.

Thanks for reminding me that doing the work I’ve been given is a gift not to be taken for granted. I needed hear that. And yes, a book would be great someday…for now…gotta get back to work.

I think editing is just like any other art. That is you need to understand the overall structure of the form…a comedy, a thriller, a mystery, narrative nonfiction, biography etc….before you can analyze someone’s work.

It’s like writing music, if you don’t understand how Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, etc. came to the previous form, perfected it and then took it somewhere else how could you help a young composer crack a sonata?

Of course I learned at the knee of my bosses, but (and I hope they’re not reading this) I don’t know that they understood the formal structures of the works they were commenting on all the time. When I asked questions like…”why is it that the ending just falls flat?” I never really got a formal explanation. Until I pursued an education outside of the publishing business in terms of STORY did I come to understand what is necessary to satisfy a reader of a particular genre.

What was also helpful is that one of the very first books I edited was THE WEEKEND NOVELIST by Robert Ray. I had to do some serious research to help Robert out of some structural jams and we had to have a number of “let’s boil it down to the essence” kind of talks about storytelling.

All of that does not mean that there is a formula, rather a form. Beethoven didn’t just sit down and write the Eroica, the 5th and ultimately the genre buster 9th Symphony without perfecting the traditional four movement symphonic form.

The first job of being an editor (not the business job, but the creative job) is to understand what kind of story the writer wants to tell and then figure out how successful the writer was complying with the forms of the genre. If you write a love story and the lovers never face an opposing force to their being together…you don’t have a love story. You have a failed story.

So the editor must go through a book and figure out how well the writer has complied with the genre and explain clearly to the writer why a particular plot point, scene, characterization etc. isn’t working.

The art of editing comes after he/she has learned how to effectively figure out and convey the problems in a story. Only then will the editor be able to actually offer solutions to the problems. Have you thought about doing this here? Instead of here? That action scene isn’t working…it’s cliche and done to death. Why not try this?

I have a particular system that I use to do this that I call THE GRID. I’ll write it up one day and put it out through Black Irish. That’s my next writing project.

The writer doesn’t always use what an editor suggests, but it gets the writer outside of the pain of putting down the first draft and focuses them on the problem. As Steve always says THE PROBLEM IS THE PROBLEM…WORK THE PROBLEM…Don’t cry in your beer if your story isn’t working. Work the problem. An editor figures out what the problems are so the writer can work them.

Editors must learn forms to tell writers what the problems are. Then the great ones can tell the writers how they might fix them.

Thanks for your interest in this stuff Jeff. Now I know I need to get THE GRID together!

All the best,
Shawn

I always thought the reason book editing was taught through apprenticeship vs. formal instruction was because it was like Chicken Sexing — the people who CAN do it, can’t really explain it, but if you watch them do it, and operate under their guidance, you can sort of pick it up by osmosis, even though, once you can do it, you’ll be no more able to explain it to someone else than they were. That sort of thing.

Is there anything to that, or is it mostly just that people are loathe to demistify art, and equally reticent to advance future competitors/replacements?

Truth is, I didn’t have what it takes to do what you do. A hard fall.

I teared up with regret when you described that brain mapping…Jesus, if only I had that gift? Art, beauty and care all wrapped up into one…

Whatever it is that you’ve chosen to do, or what’s chosen you to do…is the answer in and of itself. I just hope to God I have someone like you taking care of my little boy or girl if they need help. A doctor who cares enough to talk about Star Wars to calm a little guy or girl out of the reality of having their brained zapped is doing work that Bob and I could only dream of doing.

And yeah, Bob is as black irish as I am, hard in a crowd, but soft at the center. The perfect guy to have a glass of wine or beer with. Like Steve. Uncompromising. I believe that STORIES live at the blood/brain barrier. Seems like you do too being there so often. Maybe we aren’t wrong.

Who knows you may write a book about the important work you do someday to boot! A book’s nice, but the work is more important.

Thanks for your comment. It really made my day…and made me jealous too. Balzac I’m sure would agree. Art is nice, saving a young life…off the charts.
Yours
Shawn

I know things are getting serious when during a recent brain mapping I’m having more fun explaining to the patient the influence of Joseph Campbell’s hero journey on Star Wars than zapping his brain to make his fingers move and speech arrest. Maybe I should go read Balzac…

And when you are not, how to make it to the “right” part…

Which can be developed further as a skill not only by your efforts, but with some inspiration from the right novel at the right time.

(That perhaps can turn you the right writer, at the right moment, at the right publisher…)

I’m waiting for the next part of the article. Perhaps it’s the right one to make me think more “right” for my future plans.
I like this blend of life-experiences-conclusions- on the publication field and how the rest of us can think about it and use it in a world that there is no black and white decisions nor correct or wrong.