Your Humble Blogger thinks of blognotes as essays of sorts, that is, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, as short literary compositions on a single subject, usually presenting my personal view. So when I saw The Best American Essays 2003 on the library shelf, I thought I should pick it up.
It started paying off in the Introduction, by guest editor Anne Fadiman, who edits The American Scholar. She digresses from the description of choosing the essays that follow to tell of the time she was in the middle of editing an essay when the author died. She still wanted to publish the essay, and didn’t want to make a hash of it, so she asked his longtime editor at The New Yorker to take a look at it, “hoping he might be able to guess which of my minor changes the writer would have been likely to accept and which he would have disliked.” He sent it back with a handful of additional edits, of course. The edits were great—flipping a sentence around so that the awkward (but correct) grammar disappears, fixing a mildly mixed metaphor, changing a verb to make the sentence flow better. Ms. Fadiman showed the edits to her staff, saying, “This was like having a front-row seat at the Editing Olympics.”
A week later, of course, the New Yorker man sends another copy with a dozen more edits, to make the thing just that much better. I’m sure the posthumous article that eventually went out was spiffy.
Musing on this story, Ms. Fadiman realizes that this edition of the Best American Essays, will, like the others, be dominated by the New Yorker and, to a lesser extent, Harper’s, because not only do they get (and pay for) good writers but they get (and pay for) good editors, and give those editors time and support. The American Scholar simply doesn’t have the resources to do as good a job on that end, and she is forced to recognize it. Grumpily, or perhaps grudgingly, she suggests calling the series Best-Edited American Essays.
Well, and that’s one of the many problems with blogs; we don’t get editors. I spend an hour, or if I’m lucky two hours, and hope to get a chance to reread the thing and catch the blatant errors before hitting send. In an age when the act of editing is already under suspicion, where intermediation is suspect, the internet comes along and—Whammo—blogs. My stuff could be better, I should say my stuff would certainly be better if it were edited. So would all the other bloggers’ stuff. But that’s not the blogosphere. In the meantime, give a nice thought to the editors of the world (Gentle Readers, some of them) who do that suspect job of making things better than they were.
Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.
I’ve heard of, but have never tried, this concept called Pair Programming, in which two programmers work side by side (like literally, physically, sharing a single keyboard/video/mouse) on a program, one typing and the other observing/commenting/editing/strategizing. I assume they take turns in the roles, although I could image a team that was specialized, and optimized to play to their strengths.
Anyway, I wonder if anyone will try (or has already tried) some arrangement in which people agree to edit each other’s blog entries. Probably wouldn’t require people to be in the same room, but you would lose some of the immediacy of the blog if you had to wait for your editor before you could post it.
Aww—thanks for the kind words for editors! I’ve always been a big fan of ’em myself, even before I was one. The best editors I’ve worked with as a writer didn’t just fix commas and such (in fact, one of the worst took an entirely mechanical approach to editing, doing pretty much nothing but “fixing” commas that were only technically broken); the best ones have improved my writing, by showing me where things were unclear or confusing, what assumptions I was making that readers wouldn’t share, where my phrasing was awkward or my diction could be more precise.
I strive to emulate that approach in my own editing. Sometimes it backfires; some authors hate to be edited, and sometimes I get carried away and edit too heavily. Part of good editing is knowing what to leave alone. But most of the time it goes well, and it’s a great feeling to know that I helped an author polish their work.
Re Pair Blogging: interesting idea, but the times I’ve tried co-writing essays with someone (both sitting at the computer, one typing), I haven’t found it to work all that well. It’s not bad, but in my experience it doesn’t produce better results than the individuals working alone. I was going to say I thought the idea worked better in programming, but all the distinctions I was going to make apply equally well to programming, and I realized that the times I’ve looked over someone’s shoulder as they coded haven’t been all that great either. It does help reduce mechanical errors (typos and the like), but I don’t feel that (ime) it’s produced significantly better code in other ways. But I gather there’s more to Pair Programming than just reading over someone’s shoulder as they code, and I know the proponents of it are very enthusiastic, so maybe something similar would work with prose writing.
Editing at its best is often a conversation of a particular sort. An author works to communicate an idea, and an editor (who is also functioning as both reader and writer, though obviously dependent for focus on the original author) then points out ways in which the idea could be communicated more clearly, or ways in which the idea is wrong, or ways in which the idea could affect other parts of the context.
These functions are different in tone or flavor, but not in substance, whether the original piece of writing is fiction, analytic or persuasive essay, observation, or scholarly discourse.
In many ways, this describes the commentary feature of blogs. The blogger works to communicate an idea, and the commentators then proceed to expand upon, expound upon, and comment on the original post. There are some differences from the traditional role of the editor: (1) there is often more than one “editor” of a blog entry, (2) a later reader is privy to the editorial dialogue which is hidden in the traditional publication process, (3) commentators tend to focus more on a higher level of editing, rather than word choices, (4) commentators often view themselves as more significant contributors than editors are generally understood to be (and later readers may share this view, being privy to the dialogue), and (5) there is generally no final product which is being aimed for, so the editorial/commentary process does not lead towards a more polished final product (editus interruptus, if you will). None of these differences, however, alter the fundamental similarity between commenting on a blog entry and the first stages of the traditional editorial process.
In that respect, Vardibidian, you do get editors. What you choose to do with our comments is up to you.
About Pair Blogging: I wasn’t envisioning a side-by-side thing (I also haven’t had much luck with that), but rather a swapping thing, whereby when I post something, I first make it private so only my editor can read it, and they leave comments with editing suggestions, which I incorporate (and perhaps delete or otherwise hide the comments) before I open it to the public. (And likewise vice versa.)
I’m still not sure it’s a good idea, mind you. :^)
I’ve been pretty fascinated by the process of creating Vardibidian’s open letter to John Kerry; I like that format a lot. Expansion of that idea could be: essays get posted in blogs, commented on, and refined. Eventually a final version is created a released to a wider audience. So the community of blog readers is the editor, and there actually is a final goal.
Perhaps Vardibian would like to attempt a series of, call them position papers — final (yeah right) words on various topics, that he would take a stab at, invite comments, and eventually post final versions of (which we could all them email to our friends saying “here’s what I was trying to say”). Would be interesting.
Er … I suppose I could do that, if I wasn’t suddenly intimidated by the idea.
Also, I don’t want to detract from the other point of the blog, which is to have my Gentle Readers disagree with me.
R.I.,
-V.
You should not want your Gentle Readers to disagree with you. That’s no way to run a cult. We should all agree with you, as I do.
Except on the point of whether I agree with you.
Hmm.