A Quote by Mary Berry

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.
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.'
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.
I was interested in creating things that I could be proud of and so, you know, I was interested in being an editor of a magazine, things that I could be proud of, and so, you know, I was interested in being an editor of a magazine, but in order to be an editor of a magazine I had to become a publisher as well. I had to pay the bills. I had to worry about the printing and the paper manufacturing and the distribution of that magazine.
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.
The editor of a newspaper, who is an old friend, asked me to write a column. According to her, I cracked lame jokes all the time and read voraciously.
I was the assistant to the editor-in-chief of 'Esquire Magazine.' And my experience as an assistant was really best case scenario. My boss was absolutely the greatest boss I could have asked for. But I think there's something universal about being an assistant, regardless of whether or not your boss is the greatest or a complete terror.
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.
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.
I wrote an article on a new Porsche for 'Automobile Magazine.' I knew the editor, and she asked me to write this article. So I'm more proud of that than anything.
Of course a magazine is shaped by its editor, and each editor is different.
If you had asked me growing up what a stylist does or what a magazine editor does, I would have had no clue - how do you research something like that when you are a first-born child of an immigrant who only grew up knowing doctor, engineer, and lawyer as careers?
It was not until I began to write a book called 'Light Years' that an editor really stepped in. The editor was Joe Fox at Random House, and he wound up editing a subsequent book.
The editor, Stephen Segal, actually called me with the idea of creating an accordion book [ "The Thorn & The Blossom"], and asked if I could write a story for it. I was so intrigued! I immediately knew that it had to be a love story told from the points of view of the two main characters. Right away, I started working on a proposal. And once I had my main characters, Brendan and Evelyn, it was as though they started telling me their stories.
I was co-editor of the magazine called The Jazz Review, which was a pioneering magazine because it was the only magazine, then or now, in which all the articles were written by musicians, by jazz men. They had been laboring for years under the stereotype that they weren't very articulate except when they picked up their horn.
My husband is an editor, and in fact he was the first person who hired me as an assistant editor. Then we fell in love and the rest was history.
A magazine editor recently asked me to sit down on my 40th birthday and write an article on the most important things I had learned in my first 40 years. I told him that the chief thing I had learned was that the copybook maxims are true, but that too many people forget this once they go out into the heat and hustle and bustle of the battle of life and only realize their truth once one foot is beginning to slip into the grave. The man who has won millions at the cost of his conscience is a failure.
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