Fans of James Thurber will hopefully be well familiar with his memoir about his time spent at the New Yorker, working with its founding editor, Harold Ross. ‘The Years With Ross‘ was first published in 1958 and is still in print.
Flipping back through an old (1959) copy of the Penguin paperback edition the other day, I landed on Thurber’s long extract from a memo by New Yorker copy editor Wolcott Gibbs, in which Gibbs shares with Ross some of his rules for editing the magazine’s fiction writers. (Journonerds will probably best know Gibbs for his famous ‘Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind‘ parody of Time magazine’s ‘Timespeak’.)
Although the memo was first written in the 1930s, twenty years before Thurber quoted from it, I was struck by how many of Gibbs’ principles are applicable to most of today’s bloggers who dabble in long-form, including those of us who work at Pando. I’ve quoted the relevant ones below, including Thurber’s introduction.
(Hopefully it goes without saying that the links have been added by me. Gibbs wasn’t that prescient. Any typos that have slipped in during transcription are my doing, too.)
Here’s Thurber’s introduction to Gibbs:
Wolcott Gibbs has never got the attention he deserves. He was easily, not just conceivably – to use one of his favourite words – the best copy editor the New Yorker has ever had. For years he had to deal with the seventy per cent of New Yorker fiction that has to be edited, often heavily, before it reaches print. Gibbs, an accomplished parodist, was always able to fix up a casual without distorting or even marring its author’s style.
He was inimitable, as such word experts are, but when he quit as copy editor in the fiction department to become the magazine’s dramatic critic and to write some of its best casuals and profiles, he wrote and sent to Ross – this must have been twenty years ago – what he called ‘The Theory and Practice of New Yorker Article Editing’, based on his experiences, often melancholy, with the output of scores of writers, male and female.
...MUCH MOREThe final straw, in his editorial career, was a casual that began: ‘Mr West had never been very good with machinery.’ Here was the little man, a genre sometimes called, around the office, the Thurber husband, popping up for the thousandth time, and it was too much for the Gibbsian nerves. The Gibbs essay on editing, which has not been published before, follows:And here’s the memo itself:
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF EDITING NEW YORKER ARTICLESThe average contributor to this magazine is semi-literate; this is, he is ornate to no purpose, full of senseless and elegant variations, and can be relied on to use three sentences where a word would do. It is impossible to lay down any exact and complete formula for bringing order out of this underbrush, but there are a few general rules.
1. Writers always use too damn many adverbs. On one page recently I found eleven modifying the verb ‘said’. ‘He said morosely, violently, eloquently, so on.’ Editorial theory should probably be that the writer who can’t make his context indicate the way his character is talking ought to be in another line of work. Anyway, it is impossible for a character to go through all these emotional states one after the other. Lon Chaney might be able to do it, but he is dead.
2. Word ‘said’ is O.K. Efforts to avoid repetition by inserting ‘grunted’, ‘snorted’, etc., are waste motion and offend the pure in heart....
Today's modern blogger:
Okay, 1937's.
At Saratoga.
Last seen in May's "Resiliance, Brittleness and Catastrophic Failure: Everything Is Fine, Until It Isn't".
