A Quote by Jeffery Taylor

My last point about getting started as a writer: do something first, good or bad, successful or not, and write it up before approaching an editor. The best introduction to an editor is your own written work, published or not. I traveled across Siberia on my own money before ever approaching an editor; I wrote my first book, Siberian Dawn, without knowing a single editor, with no idea of how to get it published. I had to risk my life on the Congo before selling my first magazine story. If the rebel spirit dwells within you, you won't wait for an invitation, you'll invade and take no hostages.

Jeffery Taylor

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Jeffery Taylor
American - Basketball player
Born: May 23, 1989

Which editor? I can't think of one editor I worked with as an editor. The various companies did have editors but we always acted as our own editor, so the question has no answer.

Joe Simon

About a year after (my stories began being published), magazine editor George Scithers, suggested to me that since I was so new at being published, I must be very close to what I had to learn to move from fooling around with writing to actually producing professional stories. There are a lot of aspiring writers out there who would like to know just that. Write that book.SFWW-I is that book. It's the book I was looking for when I first started writing fiction.

Barry B. Longyear

I lived through a classic publishing story. My editor was fired a month before the book came out. The editor who took it over already had a full plate. It was never advertised. We didn't get reviewed in any major outlets.

Anita Diament

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.

Mary Berry

If you want to write a book that's very successful and famous, then it's hard. If you just want to get published, all you have to do is convince an editor that your idea will make them money.

Kate Cary

I wrote a query letter to an editor - a friend of a friend. The editor called me an idiot, told me never to contact an editor directly, and then recommended three literary agents he had worked with before. Laurie Fox was one of them, and I've never looked back.

Daniel H. Wilson

I'd been assured, at age 21 or so, by a well-known editor who saw the first part of The Secret History in what was basically its final form, that it would never be published because "no woman has ever written a successful novel from a male point of view."

Donna Tartt

To Grandma, for being my first editor and giving me the best writing advice I’ve ever received: “Christopher, I think you should wait until you’re done with elementary school before worrying about being a failed writer.

Chris Colfer

I always thought the editor should cut the film and so I'll come in and look at the movie. Just because that's the only way I can really see the ideas of the editor, it's really working together. Yes it's a hierarchy, yes I'm the boss, but I like to see and to think about the idea, and it's about us asking, 'do we have to say that?' and, 'how do we make it there?' So it's advising the editor, it's very give and take, it's very free, but in the end, it's wonderful once you get through the first couple of cuts.

Peter Weir

Forrest Mims is the author of the famous book 'Getting Started in Electronics,' published by RadioShack for many years. I bought the book in the 1980s and had a blast making the projects in it. When I was editor-in-chief of 'MAKE,' I asked Forrest to write a column for the magazine, called 'The Backyard Scientist.'

Mark Frauenfelder

Newspapers have been likened to steamships that move very slowly, in terms of their direction. And when a reporter is sent out on a story, if that reporter has his or her own personal standards and is given a certain amount of time, they're going to probably do as good a story yesterday or tomorrow as they did the day before yesterday when there was a different editor there. But an editor provides vision. An editor decides what's going to be on page one, what gets rewarded, who's given more time, who's given what beats. They set a direction.

Tom Rosenstiel

Before I wrote my first novel, 'The Expats,' I spent nearly two decades at various arms of publishing houses such as Random House, Workman, and HarperCollins, mostly as an acquisitions editor. But a more accurate title for that job might be rejection editor: while I acquired maybe a dozen projects per year, I'd reject hundreds upon hundreds.

Chris Pavone

Most written work is a conversation between the editor and the writer, that the writer essentially fulfills in public, and the editor provides the stage for that to happen as well as the prompts.

Alexander Chee

As a writer, you write the book, you give it to your editor, it's copy edited, it's published, it's thrown out there, and then there's a response.

David Bergen

I have a great editor and I enjoy, in a masochistic way, being ruthless about my own performance. How do I know, but I think I'm quite good at saying, "That's no good. That's no good. That's it. That's it. That's good." And I'm with the editor who goes, "No, I think you're wrong. That's not your best." There's an initial point in the editing, if you're directing yourself, especially in my case, where you go, "Ouch, ouch, ouch, I can't watch this." And then, there's a point where you become hard-nosed and just take your neurosis away and go, "What's working? That's okay. That's okay. We can lose that, and lose that." You get objective about it.

Ralph Fiennes

Bob Wallace was my editor at Rolling Stone when I first started writing there, and he's a wonderful editor. I was in the Philippines during the Marcos overthrow, and I was up on what was called Smokey Mountain. I think it's gone now, but it was a garbage dump with a bunch of people living on it. I was talking to Bob on the phone, and I told him, "I'm a humorist. I can't write about this." And Bob told me to let my style be dictated by the subject, to take what I saw and write about it in the tone that it requires.

P. J. O'Rourke

A Quote by Jeffery Taylor

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