A Quote by John Barton
A literary journal is intended to connect writer with reader; the role of the editor is to mediate.
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A writer can spend a decade working obsessively on a novel, but in the commerce of publishing, many of the most important decisions about any book will be made based on very short pitches - from literary agent to editor to sales rep to bookstore buyer to a potential reader standing in the bookstore, asking, 'What's it about?'
My own disposition is to trust the reader. Of course, there's a line between trusting the reader and expecting her to read your mind. That's where a friend or an editor comes in. A great editor will tell you straight when you've drifted into the latter territory.
An editor is like a professional reader, and as I became a better reader, I also became a better writer.
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.
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.
Two opposite and instructive figures in U.S. journalism during the Trump years are Gerard Baker, editor of the Wall Street Journal, and Martin Baron, editor of the Washington Post.
If it is good literature, the reader and the writer will connect. It's inevitable.
The original idea of blog publishing was that writer and reader would be on the same level. That it would be a conversation - not a lecture. People lost sight of that. We didn't. Kinja is designed to break down the walls of the ghettos. So that everybody - editor, writer, source, subject, expert, fan - can be a contributor.
We must be forewarned that only rarely does a text easily lend itself to the reader's curiosity... the reading of a text is a transaction between the reader and the text, which mediates the encounter between the reader and writer. It is a composition between the reader and the writer in which the reader "rewrites" the text making a determined effort not to betray the author's spirit.
To be a good editor or a good writer, I think you really need to be a great reader first.
I try to be a lot of things for the authors I work with - a careful reader, a helpful friend who also happens to be an experienced writer, a thoughtful editor, and a creative midwife.
I'm a writer because I love reading. I love the conversation between a reader and a writer, and that it all takes place in a book-sort of a neutral ground. A writer puts down the words, and a reader interprets the words, and every reader will read a book differently. I love that.
Every book is three books, after all; the one the writer intended, the one the reader expected, and the one that casts its shadow when the first two meet by moonlight.
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.
I tend to think that the onus is on the writer to engage the reader, that the reader should not be expected to need the writer, that the writer has to prove it. All that stuff might add up to a kind of fun in the work. I like things that are about interesting subjects, which sounds self-evident.
It is easier for the reader to judge, by a thousand times, than for the writer to invent. The writer must summon his Idea out of nowhere, and his characters out of nothing, and catch words as they fly, and nail them to the page. The reader has something to go by and somewhere to start from, given to him freely and with great generosity by the writer. And still the reader feels free to find fault.
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