Where the magic happens
Patrick Pawling
Communications strategy and content marketing for tech, healthcare and financial services.
Editing means judging. It's human and flawed and in the age of AI we need it more than ever.
Creators need the editor's perspective, the shepherding, the back and forth, the arguing, the war zone known as creativity. So does the audience. It's not about the writer's ego, not about the editor's ego, it's about how the piece lands — whether it imparts the right information, hits the right buttons in the brain and maybe provokes a smile or different thinking or, in the case of copywriting, an action.
This all requires collaboration. I'm not talking about a 10-person bureaucratic layer cake, because writing and editing by committee is too often a disaster as well as slow. I'm talking about an intimate, honest, difficult, wonderful, sometimes angry back and forth between a good editor and a good writer.
Now that I've buried the lede, which for good reason used to make my editors crazy, I want to say it was an Ezra Klein podcast that got me going on this. It's a wonderful piece that explores how to get "the thing," whatever that is, to where it needs to go. I also loved the podcast's thoughts about the broad idea of editing — not just Track Changes on a computer, but making the judgements that direct all of art and beyond. We are the editors of our lives.
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?Klein calls great editors "mystics of a sort," not technicians. I agree. What they do is part magic, part experience, part intuition and a little bit grammar school sentence diagramming, which I hated.
The podcast is a conversation between Klein and Adam Moss, former editor of New York magazine. If you care about words, what he and Klein came up with is worth an hour of your time. ?
Thoughts?
Writer. Rebel storyteller. Journalist. Communications and engagement specialist.
5 个月I've had two career-shaping editors. One was the most universally reviled person I have ever met, but he forced me to cover uncomfortable stories, go up against Philly cops and councilmen, and he never coddled me. He took a college kid who liked to write and made me a reporter. And he schooled me on the tools of being a journalist, from the fine points of AP style to knowing how to read a room and find a safe place to report from once the gunfire broke out. The second made me a writer, showed me how to break the rules of language and get away with it, how to weave magic almost imperceptibly into the mundane. Then very, very late in my career, I had an editor whose exacting standards restored my faith in journalism. Forever grateful to all three.
Proprietor of RXPhilly
7 个月I have heard of such editors..I have had exactly two.
Well stated. The old adage is correct – the a writer who proofs his own work has a fool for an editor LOL. I wouldn't be half the writer I've become without the tough love of a few very good (and very dedicated) editors. =S