The Importance of Being Edited
A few years ago, the author of an autobiographical essay I was planning to publish in The American Scholar - a very fine writer - died suddenly. The writer had no immediate relatives, so I asked his longtime editor at The New Yorker if he would read the edited piece, hoping he might be able to guess which of my minor changes the writer would have been likely to accept and whish he would have disliked. Certainly, said the editor. Two days later, he sent the piece back to me with comments on my edits and some additional editing of his own. "My suggestions are all small sentence tweaks," he wrote. "I could hear ------'s voice in my head as I did them and I'm pretty sure they would have met with his approval - most of them, anyway." Some examples: "A man who looked unmusical" became "a man so seemingly unmusical." "They made a swift escape to their different homes" became "They scattered swiftly to their various homes." "I felt that that solidity had been fostered by his profession" became "That solidity, I felt, had been fostered by his profession." These were, indeed, only small tweaks, but their precision filled me with awe. Of course you couldn't look unmusical. Of course I should have caught "that that". I faxed the piece to my entire staff because editors rarely get a chance to see the work of other editors; we see only its results. This was like having a front-row seat at the Editing Olympics.
Five days later, the editor sent the piece back to us, covered with a second round of marginalia. "No doubt this is more than you bargained for," he wrote. "It's just that when the more noticeable imperfections have been taken care of, smaller ones come into view... I've even edited some of my own edits - e.g., on page 25, where I've changed 'dour', which I inserted in the last go-round, to 'glowering.' This is because 'dour' is too much like 'piched', which I'm also suggesting."
If you're not a writer, this sort of compulsiveness may seem well night pathological. You may even be thinking, "What's the difference?" But if you are a writer, you'll realize what a gift the editor gave his old friend. Had not a word been changed, the essay would still have been excellent. Each of these "tweaks" - there were perhaps a hundred, none more earthshaking than the nes I've quoted - made it a little better, and their aggregate effect was to transform an excellent essay into a superb one.
I chose ''The Importance of Being Edited" because unlike the other quotes in this section of reading, Fadiman's quote included a personal experience that made her quote much more fascinating and memorable than the other quotes had been. A friend of mine and myself used to frequent a LiveJournal community that specializes in editing* fan-based stories (also known as 'fanfiction'). I loved that Fadiman included examples of how small sentence tweaks can mean the difference between a final product like Stephanie Meyer's god-awful piece of fantasy fiction "Twilight", and J.R.R. Tolkien's 'The Lord of the Rings'. A few simple word changes can instantly change what was merely a poor piece of writing built on good ideas into a full-fledged piece of entertainment, information, etc. *Members of this community view 'editing' as not only fixing grammatical and canonical errors, but also as a chance to blast the hell out of the story's writer and tear the characters and situations of the story into shreds before dancing about on their graves. This tends to be fairly humorous.
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