The age of celebrity editors and monstrous staffing are over.
There were all us baby boomers who had a grammar school education, started to learn, then went on the pill, the whole thing, and so there are today a lot more women writers, editors, producers, and so a lot more women’s stories. God, the BBC’s practically run by women.
I believe that all brands will become storytellers, editors and publishers, all stores will become magazines, and all media companies will become stores. There will be too many of all of them. The strongest ones, the ones who offer the best customer experience, will survive.
Not that I’ve always loved the movie when they finally come out, or if they ever come out-because many of them don’t come out-but I’ve gotten to work with really good story editors and stuff like that.
Understanding how the media actually works is critical. Because editors depend on ignorance and media illiteracy to ply their trade. The fact that many readers expect fact checking, editorial oversight, and ethics actually makes it easier for the media to be lazy.
As a linguist, I see the arbitrariness of strictures editors force on me as a writer.
So much crap passes as information that not only does the audience sometimes miss the distinction between news and crap, the editors sometimes miss the distinction.
I believe I’m a better writer now than I was when I started. I’m grateful that I had good guidance because you don’t make it in this business without good editors and a lot of support from your publishers.
I wrote poems in my corner of the Brooks Street station. I sent them to two editors who rejected them right off. I read those letters of rejection years later and I agreed with those editors.
In my experience (I am the lone father of an eight-year-old boy who lost his mother when he was one year old), parenting is the most difficult of all jobs: forget your chief executives, editors, prime ministers and the like – parenting is far more challenging.
When U.S.-based editors and columnists parachute into a news storm, it is often the stringers who keep us out of trouble, helping us glimpse the complexity behind the headlines.
And at that point, I think my experience in covering the subject helped me. I think editors felt comfortable with the idea of me telling this story because I had demonstrated that I know this business pretty well.
I think screenwriters, I think editors in the cutting room – they have a lot of responsibility that we don’t think about, but they could cut the coverage of an Asian person to focus on a white person because, unknowingly, they think that white person has more to say or is more interesting.
I broke into comics by working as a press reporter for the industry, for a trade press in comics, and reporting on events and reporting on books and so forth, and I got to know some of the editors at DC Comics in the mid-’80s.
There’s nothing that compares with the time spent all by myself on a creation that is all my own. I still think of my solo work as my ‘home planet’ in comics, though I’ve learned to listen much more to editors and trusted friends for feedback.
Not many poets have editors.
As for collaboration – I have done a lot, 26 books, and found publishers increasingly resistive to them. It’s not that the books are bad; editors won’t even read them.
I trust it will not be giving away professional secrets to say that many readers would be surprised, perhaps shocked, at the questions which some newspaper editors will put to a defenseless woman under the guise of flattery.
Authors don’t tend to stay with the same agents and editors over their entire lifetimes, but Grafton worked with Marian Wood, her editor at Putnam, from Kinsey’s first outing, and signed with Molly Friedrich, still her literary agent, with the publication of ‘B Is for Burglar.’
The poems were the only thing I wrote that was not for everyone else. Then my editors at Penguin, who were also friends and had seen several of them, aggressively urged me to do a book. Editors can be aggressive, especially after drinks. That’s how ‘Beyond This Dark House’ appeared.
There’s a lot of stuff they don’t teach you in the mythical editors’ school. They don’t teach you that you’re going to have to spend a lot of your life in crisis management.
I’m very lucky in that my agent and my editors know better. They don’t push me. Because I don’t take that well.
I’ve been mentored by editors who encouraged me to be constructive and never cruel.
When a guy is perceived as macho, female editors aren’t going to like it – because they all want to be men.
I try to help people become the best possible editors of their own work, to help them become conscious of the things they do well, of the things they need to look at again, of the wells of material they have not even begun to dip their buckets into.
None of the editors I’ve worked with have ever asked me to pull my punches. They’ve never asked me to give them anything other than my own interpretation of events.
There are many more want-to-be writers out there than good editors.
When I first started to write, I was aware of being queer, but I didn’t write about it. Queer poems would probably not have been accepted by the editors I sent them to.
There’s a curiosity about what magazine editors do, the behind-the-curtain experience.
I had a wonderful and very successful career in New York and had the privilege of working with some of the best editors and publishers in the business.
When I first quit my day job, I was terrified. I called my editors and said I’m trying to make a go of this, and they threw every contract at me they could. And for two years, I had a book or an anthology out every month.
If it were not for the fact that editors have become so timorous in these politically correct times, I would probably have a greater readership than I have.
Twitter is like overhearing people’s conversations, which is exactly what dictionary editors have been wishing we could do for years.
The publishing industry, unsurprisingly, is full of different people who love different things and express that love in different languages. Find the people, the editors and agents, with whom you share some language, and some sense of what makes literature worth reading.
Does advertising corrupt editors? Yes it does, but fewer editors than you may suppose… the vast majority of editors are incorruptible.
It’s a really exciting thing to collaborate with production designers, cinematographers and gaffers and costume designers and editors and composers.
Successful model? That’s a myth. The year I modeled was the most painful year of my life. Editors would always talk to you in the third person as though you were merely a piece of merchandise.
