It’s no great trick to take a great piece of fiction and turn it into the best story ever written, but anybody can do that. The hard thing is to make it into the best story this writer can write. — Former New Yorker Editor William Shawn, as Quoted by Roger Angell
My favorite part of the excellent new interview with Roger Angell that Willing Davidson conducted for The New Yorker are some of the nitty-gritty details of editing that Roger shared.
Shawn, the second editor of the magazine after Harold Ross, hired Angell as an editor in 1956, and he’s been a presence there ever since. I love the Shawn quote above, along with Roger’s follow-up: “You have to edit with this writer and help this writer make his piece as good as it can be,” he says. “That’s the thing, not have some idea of what it should be.”
I think it’s good advice also for writers editing themselves: Let a given piece of writing be what it wants to be, as removed from your expectations as you can.
One skill of Roger’s that makes him both a great editor and great writer is his ability to notice, to soak up a deeper sense of a story or a historic moment or a baseball game.
I actually edited Angell, theoretically speaking, in that we worked together on the collection Game Time: A Baseball Companion, published in 2003, and I was listed as editor. That did not mean helping Roger improve his verb choices.
“Angell is looking for something out there, and he wants you to look along with him,” I wrote in an August 2000 appreciation of Roger for Salon.com.
He’s still looking, at age 99, and still I’m sure allergic to encomia – but I highly recommend the interview, deftly executed, and I’m going to be mulling over Roger’s words for a while.
“I think that most people think that what editors do is take something that’s really good and try to turn it into a New Yorker story,” Roger tells Davidson. “Back in the thirties and forties, a New Yorker story was a little ironic story with the ending missing—they cut off the ending. And this was because older conventional fiction always had a wrap-up of some kind. But the stories that appeared in The New Yorker quickly grew out of that brusque, ironic tendency. …
“Editing is mostly a process of taking stuff that’s pretty good—or maybe terrific or potentially terrific—and working with the author over problems that come up: problems of tone, problems of clarity, problems of length, problems of one part fitting with another. Why has it suddenly gotten so much bigger here? What this person is saying doesn’t seem to match what she said when we first met her. Something’s happened, there’s a sag here, the energy’s gone out of the story—whatever, there are thousands of things. And young writers were terrified of this—they thought you were ruining their lives. But all writers come to absolutely depend on it. All of us, everywhere, need an editor—every single writer in the world needs an editor, or more than one.”
– Steve Kettmann
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