The fiction editor, the novel, and the novelist - Hardcover

McCormack, Thomas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 028399827X ISBN 13: 9780283998270

Publisher: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1989

Synopsis

This book describes the job of the fiction editor analyzing the skills required to assess a novel and touching on aspects of craft that are required in the writing of fiction. The author's examination of analytic tools help us to understand the reading, writing, teaching and editing of fiction.

About this title

About the Author:

Thomas McCormack, who has been an editor for over 30 years is Chairman and Editorial Director of St. Martin's Press in New York.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

The Editor's Lot

Once, as a beginner, I had an experience that revealed the editor's lot to me. I was a raw and gauche assistant that you would not inflict in person on any author, but I was thought of as a good `backroom' boy--someone at whom you could shove eleven hundred pages of chaos and demand, "Fix it!" That was my assignment on a James T. Farrell manuscript. No one had told me the difference between an editor and a rewrite man, so I toiled manically for six weeks, cutting four hundred pages, rearranging sections, rewriting sentences, rendering two hundred straight-narrative pages into scenes because the great man, then in his twilight, had simply forgotten to write dialogue. My boss did not have time to look at what I did in any detail, and the manuscript went straight into copyediting, where it fell under the eye of Frank Riley, veteran checker of scripts. I can see him now: a hundred ten pounds, very pale and gray, riven with tremors, and always seeming to smoke three cigarettes at once. "This is for you," he said, darting into my hand a memo that he had just written my boss. "In my seventeen years at Doubleday," it began, "I have never seen such a job as young McCormack has . . ." If I had had the money, I'd have hired a plane to scatter thousands of copies of the memo over New York. In fact, cross-eyed with pleasure, I promptly lost the thing.

Next came the author. Queasy with doubt, I had to bring the galleys to Farrell at his room in the Beaux Arts Hotel. (My boss decided not to show him the postoperative manuscript; the revision was put directly into type.) Farrell sat me down and went to his desk to address his novel. He read exactly six pages. Then he turned to me. This is it, I felt, and I could see the headline: NOTED AUTHOR RUBS OUT SNOT-NOSED TAMPERER. What he said, in his tough-guy Chicago voice, was, "You're good, kid." Not another word about the book, and he never read more. He spent the rest of the afternoon telling me about the Black Sox scandal.

I was young and green, but after an hour's proud elation I saw the moral clear: Except for Frank Riley, no one would ever know what I'd done in my editorial servitude. In this case, not even the author. (And don't think you now know; underlying everything I say is this unsettling fact: For all you can be sure, I too have the sensibility of a bedpan, and I may have driven a graphite stiletto through the heart of Farrell's book. Any editor can summon up some self-congratulatory story.) When working at that second part of their general assignment--the editing of the script--editors are always in the `backroom'. And I agree with Perkins: That's where we should be. I should add that my efforts did not take chaos and turn it into a great book. I never worked harder in my life, but all I managed to do was make it publishable. That too is a comment on the editor's lot.

About this edition

• Publisher: Sidgwick & Jackson
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 028399827X
• ISBN 13: 9780283998270
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 202