Chapter XXXIII: Editing Vs. Writing

In course of time I came temporarily to the occupancy of an editorial chair. I became a “We.” Because on becoming an editor you cease to be an “I,” you are more. You are several persons rolled into one. You are then the publisher, the proprietor, the paper’s biggest paying advertisers, the political party you represent, and the rest of your brother editors. Under these circumstances it is impossible for you to say what “I” think. Because in some cases you may not know what your own private opinions really are, or if they should assert themselves strongly you might not want to know them. You are a “we,” one advantage of which is that as in a sense you have ceased to exist as a personality. You are no longer personally responsible for what you say in print. The responsibility of the “we” can be distributed among so many that it need not stick anywhere and the bigger the paper the larger the area over which it can be distributed.

I knew there was a difference between “editing” a paper and writing for one, but how much of a difference I did not realize until my destiny placed me temporarily in charge of the Sunday supplement of a city daily, which, in accordance with the regulations, or rather exactions, of modern journalism, published a Sunday paper, or rather magazine, of sixteen pages. I had about forty-six columns to “edit.”

To “edit” is not to write. I speak thus plainly for the benefit of the many young men and maidens who are to swell the ranks of the great army now industriously engaged in sending contributions to the editor’s waste basket, and who still imagine that the editor does nothing but write for the paper.

I pause here a moment to ask where, at the present increase of size and amount of matter published, are our Sunday papers to stop. Already the contents of some Sunday issues amount to more than that of the average monthly magazine.

While this competition is going on at such a lively and increasing rate between newspaper publishers to give the most reading matter for the least money, I wonder if the idea may not in due course of time strike them that they may be giving to those who read more than they can really read and digest.

Our business men to-day do not read one-half the contents of the daily paper. They have only time to glance at them. They would really be much better suited could some device of journalism give them their news in readable print in the compass of a handkerchief, and give them no more.

I entered on my duties in a blissful ignorance of the trials that awaited me. I did not know how to “put a head” on an article or a selected “reprint.” I know nothing of the hieroglyphics necessary to let the printer know the various kinds of typo in which my headings should be set up. I did not realize that the writer’s manuscript must be, in a sense, ground through the editor’s mill and go through a certain process before being put in the printer’s hands. I did know that something was to be done, but the extent of that something I did not know. Of the signs to be placed on manuscript to show whether the type used should be “brevier” or “minion” or “agate,” or those to designate “full-face caps” for my upper headings and “full-face lower case” for my lower headings, of a “display heading,” of “balancing the columns,” nor that the headings on a page should not be jammed up together or too far apart. I was in that condition of ignorance that the smallest part of a printer was justified in looking down on me with contempt.

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N. B.--In the composing room a printer is a much larger-sized Indian than a mere writer.

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You who read the instructive and entertaining columns of ghastliness, accident, and crime in your morning paper--you who are unfortunately or otherwise neither writers nor printers, you think you could easily write one of those staring sensational headings over the article which tell all about it before you read it and whet your appetite for reading it. But you might not. It is not so much the literary ability needed. It is the printer who stands in the way. It is the printer who must have just so many words for one kind of “head” and so many for another. You must get your sense, sensation, and information condensed into say twenty-four or twenty-six words for one part of the “head” and ten or twelve for another part, and these must neither run over nor run under these numbers. If they do and the spaces are uneven that issue of the paper would, in that printer’s estimation, be ruined. If you, the editor, do not “make up” your pages so that the columns “balance,” the paper, for him, would be a wreck. The foreman of the composing room values a newspaper for its typographical appearance. This is right. A paper, like a house, should look neat. Only the foreman need not forget that there is something in the articles besides types. The magnate of our composing room called all written matter “stuff.” “What are you going to do with this stuff?” he would remark, and he used to put such an inflection of contempt on that word “stuff” that it would have made any but an old tough writer sick to hear him. Poems literally perspiring with inspiration, beautiful descriptive articles reeking with soul and sentiment, lively humor, manuscript written and re-written so lovingly and carefully--children of many a brilliant brain--all with him was but “stuff”!

During all the years that I had been writing I had bestowed no attention on the “making up” of a paper. I had a vague idea that the paper made up itself. I had passed in my articles, and had seen them in their places a few hours later, and never dreamt that the placing of these, so that the columns should end evenly or that the page should not look like a tiresome expanse of unbroken type, required study, taste, and experience.

I was aroused from this dream when first called on to “make up” my eight-page supplement. Of course, the foreman expected me to go right on like an old hand, and lay out in the printed form where the continued story should be and how many columns it should fill, where the foreign correspondence and illustrated articles should appear, where the paste pot and scissored matter, shorter articles, and paragraphs should be, so that the printer could place his galleys in the form as marked out per schedule.

I was confronted within a single week with all this mass of my own editorial and typographical ignorance, and even more than can here be told. It had not before dawned upon me that an editor should be--well, we will say, the skeleton of a printer. I was not even the ghost of one. I was not before aware that in the recesses of editorial dens and composing rooms the printer stood higher than the writer. “Everybody” writes nowadays. But “everybody” does not set type or “make up” papers.

I saw then what I had done. I saw that I had rashly assumed to govern a realm of which I was entirely ignorant. I made a full and free confession to our foreman. I put myself before him as an accomplished ignoramus. He was a good fellow and helped me through. It was tough work, however, for several weeks. As Sunday came nearer and nearer, my spasms of dread and anxiety increased. I was seized in the dead of night with fears lest I had not sent up sufficient “stuff” to fill my forty-six columns. Then I would be taken with counter fears lest I had sent up too much, and so run up an overplus on the week’s composing bill. I worried and fretted so that by Saturday night I had no clear idea at all or judgment in the matter, and let things take their own course.

But the hardest task of all was dealing with the mourners--I mean the manuscript bearers. I found myself suddenly inside of the place, where I had so often stood outside. I was the man in the editorial chair, the arbiter of manuscript destiny, the despot who could accept or reject the writer’s article. But I was very uncomfortable. I hated to reject anybody’s writings, I felt so keenly for them. I had so many times been there myself. I wished I could take and pay for everybody’s manuscript. But I could not. The requirements of the paper stood like a wall ’twixt my duty and my sympathy. The commands from the management allowed only a certain amount to be expended weekly for original articles. I felt like a fiend--an unwilling one--as I said “No” time after time and sent men and women away with heavy hearts. In cases I tried even to get from the rejected a little sympathy for myself. I told them how hard it was for me to say “No.” I tried to convince them that mine was a much harder lot than theirs, and that mine was by far the greater misery.

And how many times after I had suffered and rejected the MSS. did I try to answer in a manner satisfactory to them this question: “Did I know of any newspaper or magazine that would be likely to accept their matter?” How I tried to say that I did not, in a cheerful, consoling, and encouraging manner, in a manner which would convey to them and fill them with the idea that the town was full of places yawning and gaping for their articles, until they were outside of my office themselves, when I was willing that the cold unwelcome truth should freeze them.

Then I received letters asking for the return of manuscript. On entering on my duties I found the shelves piled with them--legacies left me by various predecessors--whether read, accepted, or rejected, I could not find out. But there they lay roll on roll--silent, dust covered. It seemed a literary receiving vault, full of corpses.

It was a suggestive and solemn spectacle for a young writer to look upon. Those many pounds of manuscript--articles which might make a sensation if printed--truths, maybe, which had not yet dawned on the world--all lying unread, dead, cold and unpublished.

Lone, lorn ladies came to me with the children of their brains. I referred them at times to the editor of the daily up-stairs. He referred them to me back again. Sometimes this shuttlecock process was reversed. The daily editor fired the applicant down at me. I fired him up again. The trouble in all these cases lay in the inability of these people to recognize a rejection when it was mildly and sympathetically applied. It was necessary in some cases for us to fire these people up and down at each other a dozen times before their weary legs gave them a hint of the true state of the case.

I saw more than once the man who thought to clinch an acceptance of his matter by giving me a long explanation of his article, and its value to this or that interest. I had the traveller from distant lands, who wanted to tell in print over again what he had seen. I received copies of verses, accompanied by modest notes from the senders that they might find a place “in some corner” of the paper. I was beset by a delusionist who had a theory for doing away with death, and who left me, as he said to “prefer death” and die in my sins, because I told him I had really no desire to obtain information on the subject.

Then I had the “space grabber” to deal with--the poor fellow who writes to live at so much per column, who tries to write as many columns as possible, and half of whose mind while writing is working more to fill up his columns with words rather than ideas. But our modern system of elephantine journalism is in a measure responsible for the “space grabbing” tendency, since our daily and weekly journalistic mammoths and megatheriums gape ever for more and more matter. There is so much space which must be filled, and if not filled stuffed. Every demand brings some sort of supply, and as the paper must be stuffed, the “space grabber” is developed to stuff it.

I had also to cope and meet with the literary rehasher. The rehasher is another journalistic brother who writes the same story, experience, description, etc., over and over again in different ways. He wrote it years ago. It proved a success. He has been writing it ever since. He serves it up roast, baked, boiled, broiled, fried, stewed.

These processes may endure for several years. Then he shoves it on your table, covered with a thin disguise--a gravy, so to speak--of his more recent opinion or experience. But it is about the same dish. The older and more experienced journalistic nose detects it by the same old smell. Finally it comes up as hash, plain hash, dry hash, wet hash, baked hash, but after all the same old hash.

Our papers and magazines even to-day abound with the work of the rehasher. It is just as good for the young readers. Every ten years a generation comes along for whom the rehash is quite new. They do not know that it is the same old hash written and read years and years ago by people dead and gone. The pretentious magazines dish up more or less of this hash. It is served up in style, garnished with sprigs of fine language and sentiment and has often a “dressing” of elegant illustrations poured over it. But it’s the same old hash for all that. If you look over the magazines for a period say of twenty years, you will find these rehashes--articles descriptive of Rome, Egypt, London, the Bayeaux tapestry, travels in countries worn footsore by travellers for generations, the essay on Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe. As for the frontier romance and “Wild Injun” story, that has been ground and reground into hash so fine that it has become “spoon victuals,” and is eaten only by the young and callow of the reading brood.

A literary colleague, who commands an editorial chair, says that he allows his rehashers to serve him the same article four times, providing the garnishing and dressing of the dish show artistic cookery. But he shuts down after that. This is not only charitable on his part, but possibly a great benefit to the rehasher, for if he is allowed to go on unchecked, the mental rehashing process will become automatic, the result of which will be the unconscious rehashing of the same article through all eternity.

This experience gave me, in certain respects, an entire change of heart. I will never think hard again of an editor though he does not return my manuscript even if I send stamps. I will still continue to think kindly of him though he “declines with thanks.” For I realize now that the “editor” who would do his duty must have nerves of steel and a heart of stone.