Most writers I know have tales to tell of being mangled by editors and mauled by fact-checkers, and naturally it is the flagrant instances they choose to single out -- absurdities, outright distortions of meaning, glaring errors. But most of the damage done is a good deal less spectacular. It consists of small changes (usually too boring to describe to anyone else) that flatten a writer's style, slow down his argument, neutralise his irony; that ruin the rhythm of a sentence or the balance of paragraph; that deaden the tone that makes the music. I sometimes think of the process as one of "desophistication".
That is by John Gross, from the introduction to the ninth edition of the The Economist Style Guide.
Next is a quote from this recommended essay in The Millions about the famously troubled relationship between Raymond Carver and his heavy-handed editor, Gordon Lish:
As we know now, Lish got his way by ignoring Carver’s pleas. Thus, the point of contention among the old friends: What We Talk About transformed Carver into a darling of the literary world, and despite his last-minute reservations and desperation, he didn’t deny himself the glory the book won him, and he remains one of the most revered writers of the 20th century.
Finally, from a hilarious piece by Michael Kinsley, who throughout his career has spent plenty of time as both writer and editor:
If you're lucky, your editor will have lost all interest in your article by the time you produce it, and on the way to a fancy expense-account lunch, he will pass it along unmolested to the copy editors (apprentice fiends, with intense views about semicolons). If you are not lucky, your editor will take a few minutes to ruin the piece with moronic changes and cloddish cuts before disappearing out the door.
Writers and editors will always have a complicated relationship. Writers bitch that editors ruin their glorious prose, and editors respond that writers are a bunch of ungrateful egotists whose original drafts, always submitted ten minutes before press time, are so turgidly written they wouldn't pass a kindergarten English test.
Editors have more control over a publication's final product than most readers know. Before I became a journalist, I was quick to condemn the writer whenever I disagreed with anything in the story or encountered an error, or if I thought an article poorly written. By the same token, I was too quick to praise the writer for stories I loved.
Now that I've experienced the kinds of substantive changes, good and bad, that editors have made to my own articles, I know it's much harder to assign responsibility. A great editor can save a bad writer's ass; a bad editor can massacre even the finest work.
Of course, one motivation to start blogging again after a two-year hiatus was the lack of any filter between me and the reader (assuming anybody actually starts reading this).
Not that I'm complaining about the editors at my day job, but it's nice to have a place of my own---where you'll know exactly whom to blame for the crappy writing. As Kinsley writes:
On the Internet, they don't have editors. Or they don't have many. Writers rule, and a thought can go straight from your head onto the Net. That used to sound hellish. Now it sounds like heaven.
