Thought For The Week
Author: J.J. Probasco
I'm a Word Wrassler. Sometimes I win...sometimes they do. It tends to keep the universe in balance.
Thought For The Week
Editor Advice For Writers – Maxwell Perkins
Cool! More advice! I can always use advice, seeing as how I haven’t reached a whole herd of Best Seller Lists quite yet. One of these days, I may not need it as much, but I’m still always gonna listen to the World’s Greatest Editor. Actually, I’ll pretty much always listen to all advice, as long as it’s free, ‘cause I know I don’t have to follow it if it sounds goofy but it just might be valuable. But when it’s the World’s Greatest Editor, I’m paying a lot closer attention.
The World’s Greatest Editor, according to Dana Isaacson, was Maxwell Perkins, book editor at Scribner’s for 37 years. The evidence backing that up is pretty overwhelming, considering he brought names like Hemingway, Wolfe, and Fitzgerald into the mainstream of the literary world. Mr. Isaacson is also a widely-experienced editor, writer, and literary agent, and posted the following article on the Career Authors website. I found it through the Facebook page of the most-excellent literary agent, Gina Panettieri.
So here I am, faced with writing advice by a very wise and experienced editor, that’s being pushed by a couple of very smart people who have had a lot more experience and success than me, so I’m thinkin’ it would be a good idea to take this to heart. It’s a short and easy read, but there’s a lot to think about in understanding the business, framing your approach to your task, and keeping principles in mind.
And it’s free! So you can take it or leave it without pressure, but I suspect that if it’s good enough for Hemingway, it just might do me some good. Ya think? Maybe you, too!
Writers’ Master Class: 7 Lessons from the World’s Greatest Editor
Posted by Dana Isaacson | Mar 15, 2021 | Publishing
A French literary critic once said that a great editor is an artist whose medium is the work of other men. Despite its inherent sexism, there is wisdom in that statement. Certainly Maxwell Perkins, considered by many the greatest book editor ever, left a monumental legacy in his thirty-seven years at the publisher Scribner’s, helping shape literature and guiding writers from Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dawn Powell to Ernest Hemingway.
Editors at book publishing houses play a variety of roles. Lamented Perkins, “What are we supposed to be—ghostwriters, bankers, psychiatrists, income tax experts, magicians?” We could add cheerleaders and nursemaids to that list. After Thomas Wolfe declared that he was quitting writing because of rotten reviews, Perkins wrote him, “If I really believed you would be able to stand by your decision, your letter would be a blow to me.” Writers today would be amazed to hear that editor Perkins even spent time negotiating down Wolfe’s dental bills.
Bibliophilic me treasures my tattered first edition collection of Perkins’ editorial letters, (Editor to Author, The Letters of Maxwell E. Perkins), sadly out of print but full of gems for writers.
How publishers choose
In a rejection letter to an unknown author, Perkins explains that book publishers must make money to stay afloat. But even as they strategize and carefully decide what to publish—and despite commercial motives—their role in society is significant:
“There are certain rules of quality and relevance, which can only be determined by some sort of selection, and this the publisher, representing humanity, attempts—with many mistakes—to make. Or, to put it differently, artists, saints and the other more sentient representatives of the human race are, as it were, on the frontiers of time—pioneers and guides to the future. And the publisher, in the capacity mentioned, must make some sort of estimate of the importance and validity of their report, and there is nothing he can base this on but the ability to judge that God has given him.”
LESSON 1: Like authors, publishers are gamblers, hoping for the best.
Live life
In one letter, Perkins recalls a conversation with author John Galsworthy:
“He said these writers who become writers right from the start are invariably disappointments. It is much better for a man to have been something else than a writer, so that he has viewed the world from a fixed position.”
LESSON 2: Skip your MFA, get life experience, then write about it.
Thought For The Week
Thought For The Week
Harsh Writing Advice
I enjoyed this article from Hannah Guy at Kirkus Reviews. I subscribe to their newsletter and it wouldn’t hurt anyone else to check that out, too, because that’s how I find great thoughts on occasion. Sometimes I stumble across them, and sometimes they leap out and smack me on the noggin, but they won’t do either if you don’t give them some access to you, so look for the ones with value and invite them into your email.
You can even subscribe to my blog! (hint, hint…) There are things of value in it from time to time, mostly culled from people much smarter than me, I’ll admit, but at least I’m smart enough to recognize awesome things I wander into, so there’s that.
This is a discussion on writing advice that exploded across Twitter a while back, so there’s another good thing about finding it on Kirkus Reviews because Twitter has revealed itself to be too much of a GuanoStorm for me. So far, at least. Maybe if I grow another head to help store and filter and analyze that enormous fire hose of opinions…
Take a look and enjoy, and realize that a lot of the “harsh” part is just wit and deep thoughts. Some pretty superficial, but at least enjoyable. And sometimes the truth might sound a little harsh, but you need to hear it anyway, don’t you?
Our Favorite #HarshWritingAdvice Tweets
BY HANNAH GUY
February 11, 2021
Normally we don’t pay too much attention to tweets that go viral. But there is almost always an exception to a rule.
On January 29, 2021, author A. M. Hounchell tweeted the following: “HARSH WRITING ADVICE: Your writer friends are also your competition. Sorry.” Immediately, the writing and publishing Twitterverse responded in kind, igniting a weekend of arguments, discussions, and retaliatory tweets under the hashtag #HarshWritingAdvice. A ton of folks from various parts of the writing community, including some heavyweights, weighed in and shared their own writing advice.
Even a few Hollywood folks chimed in. Seth Rogen (@SethRogen) dedicated an entire thread to answering questions about writing. Some of his advice included, “Do lots of loose notes and outlines and lists that are low pressure and if you do enough of that thinking on paper, before you know it you have stuff” and “I firmly think you have to LOVE your idea or else you’ll burn out on it.” (Rogen’s response to dealing with writer’s block? “I smoke weed and watch movies that inspire me and remind me of what effect I’m trying to deliver to the audience.”)
The trending topic has, of course, faded in popularity, but we wanted to share some of the best advice and wisdom left behind by well-known, bestselling, and/or popular writers and authors.
Are other writers your competition…or your friends?
A number of folks didn’t waste time dismissing the notion that other writers are competition. Instead, they emphasized that the writing community benefits when we all support each other. “The actual HARSH WRITING ADVICE is that it’s really hard a lot of the time and your fellow writers are the other people who understand this and will help you get through,” tweeted Food and Wine senior editor and author Kat Kinsman (@kittenwithawhip).
Other authors agreed, adding:
—Lilly Dancyger (@LillyDancyger)
—Jennifer Wright (@JenAshleyWright)
Naturally, there is always someone who sees “competition” and takes it a little further than one might expect.
“HARSH WRITING ADVICE: You have to hunt and eat your fellow writers,” was Chuck Wendig’s (@ChuckWendig) offering. “They will taste of Cheetos, pink wine and despair. But this is how the Publishing Gods are fed. Sorry.”
Less competition, more writing
Others were quick to remind writers (especially aspiring ones) that worrying about competition was less important than focusing on the actual writing you do. After all, the best way to create a great book isn’t by competing for it but by writing it.
“HARSH WRITING ADVICE: Thinking of your friends as competition isn’t going to make you a better writer, because no matter what imaginary horse race you invent, you can only write what you write,” tweeted writer/director Jessica Ellis (@baddestmamajama). “So write it.”
—Deesha Philyaw (@DeeshaPhilyaw)
—Jenna Guillaume (@JennaGuillaume)
—Wajahat Ali (@WajahatAli)
Lay off the social media
Thought For The Week
Famous Writers’ Weird Writing Habits
Stumbling…it’s what I do. Apparently, it’s what I do best, so I’m obligated to do it whenever possible. This time I stumbled across an interesting article on Flavorwire, which is an online culture magazine. I wasn’t familiar with it, sad to say, probably because I have very little culture. Their own explanation of themselves on Twitter is: “Flavorwire offers cultural news and critique around film, TV, books, music, art, and pop culture the world over. Highbrow, lowbrow, and everything in between.” By happy coincidence, I’m right there in their zone!
This article by the Flavorwire staff deals with how several famous authors get into doing what they do. If it works for them, maybe some of it can spark a thought that will help you get into doing what you do, so it doesn’t hurt to take a look. And even if it doesn’t spark much, it’s informative and entertaining for a few minutes, and everybody can use that from time to time.
And if it gives you permission to write while supine and slurping sherry…bonus!!!
Weird Writing Habits of Famous Authors
By Flavorwire Staff
Dec. 25, 2011
[Editor’s note: While your Flavorwire editors take a much-needed holiday break, we’ll spend the next two weekends revisiting some of our most popular features of the year. This post was originally published July 13, 2011.]
It’s an old topic but it always manages to be interesting — what did the authors we love do in order to write what they did? Beyond the jobs they held, what habits did they have that made writing possible? We take a look at 10 modern authors who had unusual approaches to writing; some due to the limits they would impose on themselves, others due to what they would wear or how they would attempt to channel greatness. Regardless of their methods, they have all produced work of lasting value. We might learn a thing or two from them if we’re willing to get out of our comfort zone and see the craft as just that — a skill to be exercised, not a bolt of ideas that comes if you wait long enough. So read on, dear readers, and tell us in the comments section who we missed.
Truman Capote
Capote would supposedly write supine, with a glass of sherry in one hand and a pencil in another. In a 1957 Paris Review interview with Pati Hill, Capote explains: “I am a completely horizontal author. I can’t think unless I’m lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy. I’ve got to be puffing and sipping. As the afternoon wears on, I shift from coffee to mint tea to sherry to martinis. No, I don’t use a typewriter. Not in the beginning. I write my first version in longhand (pencil). Then I do a complete revision, also in longhand.”
John Cheever
In a 1978 Newsweek essay, Cheever writes, “To publish a definitive collection of short stories in one’s late 60s seems to me, as an American writer, a traditional and a dignified occasion, eclipsed in no way by the fact that a great many of the stories in my current collection were written in my underwear.” Since the author of The Wapshot Chronicle had but one suit at the time, why rumple and wrinkle it when you can do the same thing in your skivvies? It’s sound reasoning from an impassioned man who was once known as the “Chekov of the suburbs.”
Thought For The Week
Thought For The Week
In A Tale-Spin 