In Praise of Ed

I used to write. For money, I mean. I spent about a dozen years toiling away on an Apple Macintosh, balancing telephone calls with FAX messages and e-mail and always, always meeting deadlines.

Kathie used to tell people "Mark has to come up with 750 words by Tuesday" but it was easier than that. I didn't have to actually invent 750 words. I could pick any words I cared to use. But from time to time I did build my own home-made word, if I thought that's what a piece needed.

I mention all of this to point out that I once made a pretty humble living by just thinking up the order I would string these already-invented words and shipping them off to the Big City. In every case, editors who sat in their comfy Park Avenue chairs (literally—the address of Ziff-Davis was One Park Avenue) received my efforts not as the Revealed Truth which I had so carefully sent them, but more as a guideline, an approximation, or even a first bid of the final work.

Very often, I would find my published piece lacked the, say, sixteenth, eighteenth and nineteenth paragraph of the twenty-paragraph whole. From time to time the opening paragraph would be rewritten, and as likely as not it then had little to do with the final paragraph, which I always found irritating in the way a tilted picture frame bugs me.

But in almost every case, far short of waterboarding, I would have quickly and loudly admitted that the published page was in fact better than the page I had actually shipped. This is one of the big differences between writing for publication in the classic sense and writing for publication online. There aren't as many other eyeballs involved, online.

You can find any number of books and manuals that tell you people online are in more of a hurry, that they don't like scrolling or clicking, that they want only the bullet points. I'm not sure how much I agree with any of that, but I do know most online writing goes straight from the author's fingertips to the Web, with no oversight. And I do know that is not always A Good Thing.

One of the best things you can do before you walk away from a page and proclaim it finished is have someone else look it over. If they find a mistake you missed, then so much the better. Subsequent readers will think you are just smart, careful or both. And if they don't find a problem, that just reinforces the talent and understanding you bring to bear in your writing.

I'm not big on rules of thumb when it comes to writing, online or otherwise. "Always rewrite a piece four times," "Never put more than a thousand words online" or "Always include an illustration" may be good for some situations. But not everything. I don't view the speed limit sign that says 65mph in quite the same way on a clear, dry summer afternoon as I do on a snowy, gray, frozen evening in winter. "Write until it's right" is good, though. I would hate to think Lincoln might have done another version of the Gettysburg Address, just because the one we know was only his third pass.

And how would you count rewrites, anyway? Some people are comfortable banging out a first draft with no revision at all. Then they go back and do all of the edits and spelling corrections and give it one final pass and they're done. Others (like me), will "start" a sentence, back up and "initiate" a sentence, back up again to "begin" a sentence and finally revert to "start" before they ever get to the end. If you never revisit that paragraph again, is it still a first draft, or are parts of it (at least) on the fourth?

I'm not sure, but I know I tend to get really comfortable with an idea in my head as I am committing it to the keyboard and very often I don't notice that I have not ever quite made the sale that I thought I have. Someone new, coming in for the first time, will notice that you never quite make your case, or the case you've made is weak, etc. That is why there are editors whenever anyone writes a book or a magazine article.

And that is why we should all probably have at least one other person look things over, before we click the button that turns our ideas into bits and digits and hot phosphor.