is two guys collaborating to write on writing and collaboration.
Thursday
Sep 24, 2009
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Let us now praise editors — Martin
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An older piece by Gary Kamiya, which I noticed on clusterflock today.
The art of editing is running against the cultural tide. We are in an age of volume; editing is about refinement. It’s about getting deeper into a piece, its ideas, its structure, its language. It’s a handmade art, a craft. You don’t learn it overnight. Editing aims at making a piece more like a Stradivarius and less like a microchip. And as the media universe becomes larger and more filled with microchips, we need the violin makers.
If Antonio Stradivari had an editor, he certainly didn’t give them a signature line inside his violins.
I think editing is a noble, and necessary art. Used to be that designers hired typesetters to lay out their type correctly. To worry over the punctuation and spacing, the ligatures and em-or-en dash decisions. Now designers are responsible for this as the typesetters of the computer age.
So too must writers become editors, or at least better editors. They must be self-reliant. Design has both suffered and exploded with new creativity over the loss of typographers, so too will writing suffer and explode with the loss of editors.
Who, it should be pointed out, have every opportunity to explain to writers their value, and why a self-publishing small business person who is making their way as a writer should hire an editor to work on their texts.
