Editorial Skills
From The Benign Reality, p. 437, From the Editors' Meeting in March, 1980, at Seattle, Washington. Reprinted from Present Time No. 39, April, 1980
Excerpted in February 2022.
See The Benign Reality for the longer report.
CHAIRPERSON: Why don’t you begin, Harvey? You probably have some things to say about editing, and then the rest of us will respond.
HJ: First, editing and writing are two different jobs. I have learned that. Other people learned it before me. The New Yorker is one of the best edited magazines (that and the Scientific American). In the stories of the New Yorker the staff there learned that they needed to put in as much or more time editing as they did writing. Though people can do both writing and editing, the jobs are separate. The editorial viewpoint cleans the writing up, gets outside the writer’s patterns. The two jobs are both important. As editor, you have a separate job to do. A writer can edit his or her own writing. We all have to, but it is much harder. The outside editor’s viewpoint is very valuable.
Second, one doesn’t edit from an abstract viewpoint. If you think you do, you are deceiving yourself. You need to be very clear what your viewpoint is when you are editing. I think the viewpoint for RC journals is an intent for theoretical correctness and Community building. We are putting these magazines out, not as an exercise in literary vanity, but as weapons, tools, to prevent the extinction of humanity. Theoretical correctness and up-to-date emphasis are important. . . . We all need to edit our journals in a way that places emphasis on raising the level of counseling in the Community. [The emphasis keeps changing over time.] This needs to be in every single journal. It shouldn’t be crowded out by the liberation issues because we won’t get anywhere with them unless we raise the level of counseling. If Pensamientos isn’t pointing toward improving counseling, if Young and Powerful isn’t campaigning for improved counseling among its young people constituents, they are missing the point, in this current period. . . . .
I think it is important to say that as an editor of an RC journal you don’t owe anybody anything. Your responsibility is to the Community and to the theory. If somebody has written an article, this does not obligate you to print it. These are things I have learned the hard way. It doesn’t matter how much effort the writer has put into the writing or how hurt his or her feelings are going to be, the writing does not deserve to get into print unless it adds to the strength and effectiveness of the Co-Counseling and the Community. You cannot be guided by any attitude of being afraid to hurt somebody’s feelings, or of feeling obligated, or anything like that.
If you have told the writer how to write it and they have worked hours on it and it is still no good, then it is still no good. Don’t print it. It is so expensive and so draining of our resources to get our publications out, that everything in them needs to be good. If the article or letter isn’t good, it just shouldn’t be included. We will print fewer pages or postpone publication for six months.
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Although at the beginning of discussion of new issues we need to allow for the expression of various viewpoints until we can determine a correct policy, nothing should be printed that is incorrect from our current understanding of theory. It has been a great relief to me to realize this and to remind myself of it. We editors are not obligated to any patterns, people, or pressures. Our only responsibility is to do a good job.
It is important to be technically correct and also literarily sound. This means good language. Technical correctness does not mean harsh language. Two people, a writer and an editor working together, should always be able to achieve good writing. This means interesting language, language that you like to read, that slips easily into your eyes and brain. Don’t settle for less than that. That doesn’t mean uniformity. Other’s writing doesn’t have to sound like your own writing. I think that if you trust your own judgment, you’ll know this. If you relax, and think, “What would I like to read?” that there will be material coming in in very different language from yours and it will be very charming. Working-class and other cultures’ language and expressions are just fine. You don’t at all need to achieve uniformity in the name of correctness. I would say, over and over again, trust your own hunches. I think that this should be in neon lights. When people really trust their own judgment (which they sometimes have to peel through several layers of obligation feelings to get to), it is always right. Your own real hunches are always right. You can trust them.
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You don’t leave bad language in (meaning patterned phrases or poor communication or vague terms), but there are in the United States, for example, forty or fifty different spoken languages. They are all good languages. Working-class languages are excellent languages. Black English is an excellent language. If you trust your own judgment, you will know the difference between bad Brooklynese and good Brooklynese. People will send you poor writing in a lot of different languages and the writers will be grateful to you for cleaning that up. You will know how to clean it up. The basic goal is that you help the writing say what the writers want to say.
One example of poor writing is the use of “real” and “really.” They just infest current contributions. Hardly anyone (including many of you editors) seems to dare let a statement stand by itself without inserting five “reallys” in it. I cross out hundreds of “real “ and “reallys” each day. It is insecurity coming through in writing. “You won’t believe I mean it unless I say ‘really.‘“ It weakens any statement. Young people’s language will be full of “reals” and “reallys” and “stuff” and “things.” When writers resort to “things” and “stuff,” nine times out of ten it is because they were scared or insecure or didn’t know the right word. If you know the right word, stick it in.
EDITOR: You said that we don’t have to print anything unless it is good and don’t owe anybody space in a journal. I wonder how much time to put into editing and re-writing. Sometimes I wonder. A contribution comes and I am overjoyed. So, even if it is poorly written and unclear, I spend hours trying to figure out what it is they are trying to say and re-write it so that it is readable. Then I wonder if it is their article anymore.
HJ: If you think that it is what they meant to say, go ahead. Don’t spend hours worrying about it, just re-write it and ask the writer, “Is this O.K.?” In the majority of cases, they will think that it is the way they wrote it in the first place.
EDITOR: You set a good example of that. You’ve edited and re-written a lot of articles for people that they were delighted with.
EDITOR: I’ve heard several people say, “I didn’t know I wrote that well.”
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HJ: What you will need to spot is any reactive motivations operating. . . . You can spot such a motivation to be a “big wheel,” to be prominent, and how it is taking precedence over thinking out the actual issues. When you spot that, don’t give up on the person but drastically revise the writing. . .
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EDITOR: I’d like to hear from people who’ve had some experience motivating people to share thinking in addition to their experience. I think that is the next step with the elders and I’m not sure how to start. I’d like to hear from people who have had experiences that have worked.
EDITOR: I have encouraged people to write me letters and not to worry about writing theoretical articles. There is often some way that people freeze when they try to write “theory” articles and they get very stiff and unreadable. I ask them to write me what they have been thinking and then I excerpt it or edit it and they improve from there. I am encouraging people to write me letters about what they are thinking, not just about their experiences.
EDITOR: At a Regional Workshop we had topic groups where people had a chance to discharge first and then think about a particular area, trying to come up with a rational policy. With people having a chance to discharge first, they came out with clear thinking and not just experiences.
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EDITOR: I have been recently calling people that I’ve heard are beginning to put out thinking or writing them a letter telling them that what they are thinking is important. They usually have sent me contributions and have been willing to work with me and are pleased that I have asked. We need to do that to generate excitement back to them.
EDITOR: One of my problems is that I asked somebody for her experiences around support groups and I got a theoretical article. That isn’t what I wanted. I also wanted to ask the name of the books about the New Yorker.
EDITOR: Brendon Gill, Here at the New Yorker.
HJ: James Thurber wrote the funny one, My Life With Ross. Another is Ross and the New Yorker, by Dale Kramer.
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HJ: I think there is a difference in journals. The RC Teacher is largely experience- sharing and if it is coherent and clear I don’t think so. The magazine that really needs superb editing, and is very difficult, is Seeds and Crystals, because each poet feels you mustn’t touch a comma and yet we need to break that down because that is how the good poets developed. Harriet Parker with her poetry magazine in the early 1900’s developed almost all the U.S. poets simply by requiring them to re-write and re-write. I wish we could get that started but it will be hard. Basic theoretical articles need a great deal of revision. One thing that we have vowed that we are going to do here but we’ve seldom yet done it except in the last black policy statement is to send back the first drafts all marked up after they are re-typed so that people can see the actual corrections.
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EDITOR: I asked for everything back so I would know but it hasn’t come yet.
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EDITOR: . . . lot of people write a lot of painful emotion into their articles. I can shift them so that they are readable to other people. This is particularly a problem around liberation areas where people are trying to speak to the oppressor. I would like to hear others’ thoughts. Part of what I do is to try to re-write it in the third person instead of “you do this wrong” or “you do that wrong.” I have them talk in more general terms rather than sound accusing. This seems to make it easier for people to read because they don’t feel personally attacked and defensive, but rather absorb the information. Yet a lot of people write as if they were writing directly to someone. I guess I am wanting reassurance that other people shift things that way and that it makes sense to do.
HJ: In my opinion, painful emotion does not belong in our publications. The “Listen, oppressor, I’ll tell you how bad you are!” kind of approach is great in a session, but it doesn’t communicate well. There is a special insight that we have reached in RC that there are no human oppressors, and for us to let it appear in our literature as if there is, is a mistake. Other painful emotion should be edited out, also. I don’t really think that we lose any fire. That is always a worry that you will lose fire and life unless you have painful emotion in your copy. I think it comes out far more alive if you strain the painful emotion out. The people who settled for it and eulogized it before just didn’t know how to get rid of it.
EDITOR: One fear is of over-editing. The few times (it has been rare) when a writer said something about my editing too much, I have said that it is the journal’s policy that everything that goes in gets edited five or six times, so if the writer wants to do it, I won’t have to, because, invariably, if it has been edited a lot, it is a better draft. That seems to help them understand it.
EDITOR: Is there a danger of over-editing—of no longer having what you started with?
EDITOR: I am sure there is, but I think it is more a fear than an actual danger.
HJ: I think it is the kind of editing rather than the degree of editing that you have to watch out for. If you have patterned editing where you are trying to make everything uniform or safe or timid then you can take the life out of the writing. As long as you are pursuing clarity and the absence of distress, I think the more you can edit the better. Every time I read a journal after it is printed, I wish I had gone over it one more time.
EDITOR: You talked about the difference between The Human Situation and the editing you could do on that and the more recent books. Did you go over The Human Situation ten or twelve times before printing?
HJ: Maybe nine or ten times. For The Upward Trend it was six. You can tell the difference. I think the fear of excessive editing is a mistake, but you do need to watch out for the wrong kind of editing. If you are trying for safety and uniformity and no criticism from anyone, if you start editing out of your fear, you can take the life out of an article or letter.
EDITOR: This may be helpful: I will edit an article and then put it down and come back and edit it again later. I have often felt bad that I have to go over it three or four times before I am satisfied with it. It feels like I ought to be able to pick it up and edit it once and have it done. It feels like I am wasting time; that it is my slowness if I can’t just edit it straight through the first time. I am realizing that that is not true.
HJ: Everyone feels they should be able to write a perfect first draft, but nobody can. Those who seem to do so have written it over five times in their heads. There is a general principle for any thinking that you fire a first shot and then you correct and correct and correct. It applies in writing and editing, too. Frost, who did some nice poems, always had about 2,000 poems in a drawer. Every so often he would go through it and pick some poems out and re-work them a few times and then put them back in to age. The thinking had to go on in his head over a long period of time. Only after this re-working had gone on for several times did he feel that a poem was ready for publication.
EDITOR: Hemingway was notorious for re-writing. The Old Man and The Sea was supposed to have been re-written 212 times.
HJ: We have to compromise with the need to get something actually published, but otherwise the more re-working, the better the writing.
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HJ: We have a general policy, which is that the journals are weapons and tools for re-emergence, individual and social. If they’re not playing that role, they should be. . . .
Overall, our editorial policies are the policies of the Community. Our journals’ policies are simply extensions of the overall Community policies into particular areas. When we look at a particular magazine, there are certainly going to be specific policies. They will tend to be within the framework of the liberation policy statements that are developing. Ruah Hadashah will have to deal with Jewish-Arab unity and will have to have a position on that. Young and Powerful must have a position on the full respect for young people and their reclaiming of power and never yielding their power. This is not going to be identical with the policy for Men.
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EDITOR: What about reprinting from other journals? There has been good writing on leadership in Present Time and some of it, I feel, should appear in The RC Teacher. I did go through the liberation journals and try to pull out articles since we know everybody doesn’t read every journal.
EDITOR: Assuming the article is good I think it is an easy decision if you are reprinting from a more specialized journal to a less specialized one like The RC Teacher or Present Time. I think it is a little more difficult decision, especially because cost is involved, when you are reprinting from Present Time. There are a couple of articles in this edition of Present Time that were sent to me as editor of Recovery and Re-Emergence but were also sent to Present Time. They are exactly right for Recovery and Re-Emergence, but, chances are, everybody has read them because they are in Present Time.
EDITOR: Well, I still find it helpful to have things together. I wouldn’t want the journal to be mostly reprints of other journals, but I find reprinting helpful. We have reprinted things from Present Time because they speak to an issue we are trying to help people think about. In the last issue of Sisters I reprinted the Caucus Report from Fat Women that was printed in Present Time because it is an area that a lot of women are starting to think about and it helps people to focus on and then generate more thinking for Sisters. In conjunction with liberation issues, I really want to go through Pensamientos and Black Re-Emergence and look for things that women have written in those journals that they don’t think of sending to Sisters yet.
HJ: I think you have to use individual judgment. Watch out that we are not reprinting just to be lazy and remember that we can’t afford to reprint in several places. Every page costs us a huge amount. I was against the reprinting from Present Time in The RC Teacher this time, but Katie said, “Remember, a new teacher gets all the back RC Teachers but not all the back Present Times under present arrangements,” so I gave in. One might think, “If you are reprinting, why put out a special journal?” Yet, the only Caring Parent that has come out is almost entirely reprints, and that has had a powerful impact on parents because it was all brought together in one place. So make sure that your journal is contributing and could stand on its own two feet. A certain amount of reprinting does lead people to read the other journals. It is good promotion.