Book writing is a little different because, in my case, my editor is a year younger than me and basically has the same sensibility as me.
I always read what I write out loud, and I did that long before any radio thing. My editor finds that unusual.
My friend Leonid Shvets is a long-time journalist, commentator, and editor. He was born in Belarus and came to Kharkiv, in eastern Ukraine, to go to school, then moved to Kiev for work.
I loved editing, and being a cookbook editor is a really a great job.
‘The Danish Girl’ was published in 2000. Then it, too, would disappear, as most books do. It fell out of print almost everywhere. I wrote other books and, as an editor, worked on dozens more. Yet always, Lili stayed with me.
Andrea Schulz became my editor in 2009.
On the other track I got to talk with Jon Poll, my editor, and we go into more detail about the decisions we made in both the production and the post-production. So I hope the combination becomes something worth collecting.
After I had written more than a dozen adult genre novels, an editor I knew in New York asked me to write a mystery for young adults.
Scorsese has very defined ideas about how to shoot a scene, and he’s an editor himself – we cut together. It means he’s constantly thinking about my problems while he’s filming.
It is a curious foible of a certain type of mind that it is unable to imagine a newspaper editor as one who may, on some public questions, honestly have the same view as that held by other persons.
As a book editor, you need to pitch every one of your books again and again, dozens of times, for months on end. From a quick conversation with your boss or a letter that’ll be read by just one person, to a five-minute speech in front of 50 colleagues or cover copy that’ll be in front of millions of eyes.
I took one film class at NYU over a summer and learned the basics – you know, how to load a camera and how to light and how to edit – and I became a film editor.
Never the less, at the age of fifteen, having never seen a writer, a poet, a publisher or a magazine editor, and having only the vaguest ideas of procedure, I began working on the profession I had chosen.
Thomas, my 15-year-old, is effectively my editor, I’ve always trusted his voice, more than anybody, on the strip for years. He has one of those ears that’s just tuned to the rhythm of humor, so if he says something’s not funny, my stomach just hurts because I know he’s right, and it’s already been drawn.
I remember when an editor at the National Geographic promised to run about a dozen of my landscape pictures from a story on the John Muir trail as an essay, but when the group of editors got together, someone said that my pictures looked like postcards.
I was a film editor for eight years before I made my first feature, ‘Dog Soldiers.’ I am from Newcastle upon Tyne, in the northeast of England.
I always try to write from memory, and I always try to use memory as an editor. So when I’m thinking of something like a relationship or whatever, then I’m letting my memory tell me what the important things were.
I was doing some research on menstruation for a column. I read about Arunachalam Muruganantham’s life and work, and his story gripped me, and that is when I sat down, wrote the first few pages, and sent them off to my editor to have a look.
I’ve rewritten a lot of the scripts I’ve done. ‘Little Shop Of Horrors’ was a complete rewrite, but I didn’t touch the dialogue. Essentially, I’m a very good editor.
Being an editor doesn’t make you a better writer – or vice versa. The worst thing any editor can do is be in competition with his writer.
My dad was an editor and a writer, and that’s actually what I aspired to be.
I never take credit for my movie’s success. I am the face of the movie, but there are numerous unsung heroes behind the scene. From the director, cameraman and editor to the light boy, everyone knows how difficult it is to satisfy the audience.
I started making little films with a 16 mm camera as an undergraduate at Yale. My first job out of college was ‘assistant editor’ on a forgettable low budget feature.
A very good editor is almost a collaborator.
One of my first jobs was as a recipe tester for a PR agency. One week, the editor of ‘Housewife’ magazine called my boss and asked me to write a column – the cookery editor had gone away on a press trip. I was terrified.
I was working at the ‘Evening Standard’ when I heard that there was a job going as deputy literary editor on the ‘New Statesman.’ I remember thinking, ‘That’s perfect.’ It was three days a week, and I had children, but I could make that work – so I applied for it and got it.
I got into journalism, actually, when I started my graduate program at Portland State and ended up becoming the multimedia editor of the student paper and covered very uninteresting stories on campus: this culture event, dance night.
I got a job as an assistant film editor, which lasted for a few years, but I found writing incredibly difficult, and I thought, ‘How am I going to make a film if I can’t write?’ I didn’t really comprehend that someone else would do that bit.
I once had a story editor ask me not to use the word ‘placenta.’ I wanted to say: ‘Now tell me again how you got here?’ Oh, right, an angel of God placed you into the bill of the stork.
The writer who can’t do his job looks to his editor to do it for him, though he won’t dream of sharing his royalties with that editor.
In one sense, newspaper editor is an appropriate job for an out-of-work politician; politicians live the news cycle as intensely as editors.
My father was a newspaper editor, so I was surrounded by journalists my entire life. I think the fact that he was so well known may be why I chose to go into magazines and move to the States at a young age.
With my own videos, I definitely have more control over what I want to put out there and what I want to say. With the TV show, I’m not the editor. There’s always things that I wanted to put in there. My dad has the final say in everything on YouTube, but I can be more expressive.
I’d actually argue that the best thing to happen to the ‘Washington Post’ was hiring Marty Baron, maybe the greatest newspaper editor of his generation.
An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff.
It is often pointed out to me that, in a brief time, I have gone from unknown film editor to star of ‘Gomer Pyle,’ guest star in two TV specials, and a night club headliner, and that this must necessarily have wrought some deep changes in me.
I was spending all my time at the ‘Crimson’ – like, 70 hours a week – and I didn’t go to class for, like, a year. I failed out of school. I had to leave Harvard, really, halfway through my tenure as the ‘Crimson’ managing editor. It was this incredibly humiliating and shocking experience.
Being editor of WikiLeaks was always a pretty difficult job.
My father was this huge, influential intellectual in the ’60s and ’70s. He was one of the main players in the cultural discussion in Sweden, the editor of papers.
I have been collecting recipes and information for over 20 years, but three years ago, my editor said to me, ‘You’re a walking encyclopedia of food, so why don’t you do an encyclopedia?’
One of the great joys of launching your idea on the web is that it’s a meritocracy. The good stuff will rise to the top and find an audience, and you don’t have to impress one idiosyncratic commissioning editor.
I don’t know how you can tell a good actor in the movies. I really don’t. I think you simply just do the part and hope to God that the director has a good cutter and a good editor, and it’ll all get cut and put together so that you look good in it.
At one time I thought the Editor of the Lancet would kindly publish a letter from me on the subject, but further reflection led me to doubt whether so insignificant an individual would be noticed without some special introduction.
When I was 21, I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for ‘The Simpsons’ who’d briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life.
We were working on ‘Senna’ for a long time before we were fully financed, so we didn’t actually have an editor for a while.
You’ve got to be an editor in order to be a good composer.
It’s a different world because of the Internet and bloggers. Now, every editor is concerned about speed because every minute counts. Speed is more important than content. Whoever gets a review out first becomes the authority.
I cried most days working on the first draft. The last scenes were the hardest. I had a feeling where I wanted to end – the exact note – but I couldn’t see how to get there. Sarah Murphy, my editor, asked the right questions to help me. I think of ‘The Bear’ as a hopeful book.
The reason I was successful in launching my first book with bloggers is this: I assumed that I should spend as much time on a blogger with a million-person readership as I would pitching an editor of a publication with a million person subscription-base.
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.’
