Writers Vs. Editors: A Battle for the Ages

Like the detectives and the prosecutors on law & Order, two very different groups of people are responsible for the words that fill the world's magazines and newspapers. There are the writers, who produce the prose, and the editors, who do their best to wreck it. Writers are sensitive souls--generally intelligent and hardworking but easily bruised. Treat them right, though, and you will be rewarded. Writers shape words into luminous sentences and the sentences into exquisitely crafted paragraphs. They weave the paragraphs together into a near perfect article, essay or review. Then their writing--their baby--is ripped untimely from their computers (well, maybe only a couple of weeks overdue) and turned over to editors. These are idiots, most of them, and brutes, with tin ears, the aesthetic sensitivity of insects, deeply held erroneous beliefs about your topic and a maddening conviction that any article, no matter how eloquent or profound or already cut to the bone, can be improved by losing an additional 100 words.

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.

I didn't always feel this way. (And even now, nothing here should be construed to apply to the editors of TIME, who edit with the care of surgeons, the sensitivity of angels and the wisdom of the better class of Supreme Court Justices.) I have spent most of my professional life as an editor. When editors get together, they complain about writers with the same passion that writers bring to complaining about editors.

Editors are selfless, editors believe. They labor in anonymity and take their satisfaction vicariously. The writer gets all the glory. He gets the big bucks. He gets invited to the parties, the openings, the symposia, while the editors toil at their desks turning the writer's random jottings and pretentious stylistic quirks into something resembling English prose. But that's O.K. Editors don't mind. They say, "Have a lovely time at that writers' conference, and we'll have the rewrite done when you get back." ("And your laundry too, you unappreciative bastard," they mumble under their breath.) Writers Vs. Editors: A Battle for the Ages - Michael Kinsley

[thanks YA]