Steal Like an Editor
Good Editing Techniques from Other Experts
Thursday Writing Editing Advice: Chronology, Moses, and Extra Sentences
“Steal like an artist” is one of those phrases that lives in the lexicon without one knowing exactly how it got there or where it came from. It turns out it came from a book published in 2012, a kind of a self-helpy, how-to-be-creative type book. Having recently been turned onto the excellent podcast If Books Could Kill, which is about massive airport self-help/finance/big think bestsellers, I’m instantly a little weary of the book this popular idea comes from. (Unsurprisingly, the author seems to have turned this bestseller on how to be an artist into a career of giving advice and not into a career as an artist). However, even silly self-help books often contain a good kernel of an intuitive idea and a clever way to say it. And I’ve always liked the sentiment behind “steal like an artist”. Basically, it’s a fancy way of saying “if you see an example of a good way of doing something, don’t be shy about using it yourself.” The artist part is important only because it fights back against the natural impulse that a creative act has to be original.
Some editors, like artists, like to valorize their own methods to make themselves seem unreachable and heroic (they especially like to embellish the length of time they say it takes to edit; i.e. five days per page). But really the whole job of editor is creative-adjacent enough so that there’s no technical manual, no laws of thermodynamics for how to get writers to improve their sentences or restructure their manuscripts. Just like artists, it’s important to watch other editors (or writers) to see how they do things and take the ideas that you think might work if you put them into practice yourself. Here’s just a few that I’ve “stolen” and implemented over the years:
1. Chronology, Chronology, Chronology
Often at Dear Head of Mine we talk about writing fiction because it’s generally more interesting to talk about, but nonfiction books also have their own art of construction. Even though I never had the pleasure of working with the late, legendary editor, Alice Mayhew’s sage advice radiated across floors of the building I work in and through all of the other editors who encountered and worked with her. Editor of books like Woodward and Bernstein’s classic All the President’s Men and Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, Mayhew’s devotion to chronology was so massive that it was called out in her New York Times obituary.
When a nonfiction book is getting messy, an editor should always turn the writer back to their friend chronology. Nonfiction is, most generally speaking, a place to tell a narrative, an argument, or a history clearly, and there is no sure way to ensure clarity in storytelling than abiding by chronology While plenty of nonfiction writers have ignored chronology and done so successfully, every diversion from chronology carries the danger of breaking the natural logic of time and creating a confusing web of if/then. When in doubt, an editor should advise a writer (especially of certain genres of nonfiction) to walk the forward path of chronology.
2. The Robert Moses Moment
The editorial idea I liberated from The Power Broker—which I feel obligated here to admit I’ve only read the first 150 pages of—is to advise nonfiction writers to hit their reader over the head with a brick about the importance of the topic they’re writing about. The inspiring passage starts on page 5 of the introduction with the lines: “No mayor—not even La Guardia—left upon its roiling surface more than the faintest hints of lasting imprints. But Robert Moses shaped New York. Physically, any map of the city proves it. The very shoreline of metropolis was different before Robert Moses came to power.”
From there, Caro includes a densely pack list of awe-inducing accomplishments of the structures that Robert Moses built in New York. Here’s a taste:
“Standing out from the map's delicate tracery of gridirons representing streets are heavy lines, lines girdling the city or slashing across its expanse. These lines denote the major roads on which automobiles and trucks move, roads whose very location, moreover, does as much as any single factor determine where and how a city's people live and work. With a single exception, the East River Drive, Robert Moses built every one of those roads. He built the Major Deegan Expressway, the Van Wyck Expressway, Sheridan Expressway and the Bruckner Expressway. He built the Gowanus Expressway, the Prospect Expressway, the Whitestone Expressway, Clearview Expressway and the Throgs Neck Expressway. He built the Cross Bronx Expressway, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the Nassau Expressway, the Staten Island Expressway and the Long Island Expressway. He built the Harlem River Drive and the West Side Highway.”
And it goes on, exhaustively, for the next two pages. Caro puts everything into making his case, going for it with biblical grandness. By the end of this passage, he’s convinced any skeptic that Robert Moses is an important subject worthy of reading about. Caro wrote an 1,100-page book so he had to swing big at the beginning, but the advice for any nonfiction writer in long or short form would be to give the reader your Robert Moses Moment. An editor should give writers the license to lay it on thick for once, to encourage them to stake their claim for why what they’re writing about matters in the most grandiose way possible.
3. Summary Sentences
This editorial observation is stolen directly from inside my own home. My wife who is a literary agent does probably just as much editorial work as I do as an editor (but in a different way). One of her great observations that has stuck with me and that I’ve incorporated in line editing, is a tendency for fiction writers to tack on extra sentences at the end of paragraphs summarizing what they’ve tried to tell or show in the preceding paragraph. For example, a writer will make a killer joke, or conjure a wonderful deadpan moment, only to step on it by making sure the reader really gets the point. This falls under the board umbrella of the axiom “trust the reader”, but is a practical thing for editors (and writers!) to be on the lookout for as it comes up often and is an easy way to strengthen sentences by subtraction, leaving the reader lingering on the best line or moment.