Writers take words seriously-perha ps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.
Without the book business it would be difficult or impossible for true books to find their true readers and without that solitary (and potentially subversive) alone with a book the whole razzmatazz of prizes, banquets, television spectaculars, bestseller lists, even literature courses, editors and authors, are all worthless. Unless a book finds lovers among those solitary readers, it will not live . . . or live for long.
Be persistent. Editors change; tastes change; editorial markets change. Too many beginning writers give up too easily.
I really only became an editor, or started doing my own editing because I was filming the docs and you simply can't keep an editor on for as long as it takes so.
I've learned over time that every editor has told me when you're getting that much hate, you don't talk about it. You just kind of don't give it oxygen and let it go away. It's almost - not always, but almost - always the best policy.
We just have to come in every morning and somehow, launch the editor.
Hours is an understatement. I honestly don't know how the director and editor decide each week what actually makes it on the air. There's of course director and cast commentary on each episode on the DVD. We had a blast recording that.
Most of the writers I know have somehow managed to stay in touch with that inner child who's never heard of such a thing as an internal editor.
You get spoiled as a novelist because you get to be the director and the editor, and you play all the parts, but as a screenwriter, you are a bit down the ladder.
My wife and I, we work together. And we wrote this book, "Dad Is Fat." And in the book, I was encouraged constantly by my editor to be more personal and talk about more personal experiences.
Try pitching a story of happiness to your editors and their toes are going to curl up.
I don't usually see what I've done. I don't often watch the film or watch the show. It's really about that experience on-set and within the scene. Because later, when the film comes out or the show comes out it's the editor's realm or the director's realm. But that moment on set, that's that electricity between me and another actor, and that's really what excites me.
I see music as an aid. It overcomes my internal editor, especially when the music evokes the character or the mood I'm trying to build.
Every newspaper editor owes tribute to the devil. [Fr., Tout faiseur de journaux doit tribut au Malin.]
You really don't need to hire a debt settlement company to negotiate with your creditors.
Part of the discipline of being an editor is that you have to be a good audience member; your work is to be a surrogate audience member on the films you are working on.
[Walter Burns is] the archetypal managing editor-ruthless, self-righteous, manipulative, downright maniacal if it means an exclusive, especially one that it can congratulate itself for on its own front page.
the Real-World was a sprawling mess of a book in need of a good editor.
I was asked by an editor to consider writing something about an American inventor. I asked him if he knew who invented the computer. He said he didn't. In that case, I told him, I should write a book about John Vincent Atanasoff.
I learned not to be so bitterly defeated when my fiction took a beating from editors. I learned in advertising to color in the lines and have my work done on time and to make it the very best it could be.
What had brought me to New York in the autumn of 1972 was a letter of recommendation written by Norman Mailer, the author of 'The Naked and the Dead' and American literature's leading heavyweight contender, to Dan Wolf, the delphic editor of 'The Village Voice.'
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.
When I came out publicly, some photo editors had a field day searching for pictures of me with a limp wrist or some other stereotypical gay signifier - as though, after decades in the public eye, they'd suddenly come across a trove of shots where I looked like a Cher impersonator.
To practice - write each and every day if possible - then try to attend professional writer's conferences where you can learn your craft, get to know fellow writers, and meet editors and agents.
The resistance to my work, and to my way of writing, has been there from the beginning. The first things I wrote were these short short stories collected in At the Bottom of the River, and at least three of them are one sentence long. They were printed in The New Yorker, over the objections of many of the editors in the fiction department.
