The Artful Edit Quotes

“An editor doesn't just read, he reads well, and reading well is a creative, powerful act. The ancients knew this and it frightened them. Mesopotamian society, for instance, did not want great reading from its scribes, only great writing. Scribes had to submit to a curious ruse: they had to downplay their reading skills lest they antagonize their employer. The Attic poet Menander wrote: "those who can read see twice as well." Ancient autocrats did not want their subjects to see that well. Order relied on obedience, not knowledge and reflection. So even though he was paid to read as much as write messages, the scribe's title cautiously referred to writing alone (scribere = "to write"); and the symbol for Nisaba, the Mesopotamian goddess of scribes, was not a tablet but a stylus. In his excellent book A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel writes, "It was safer for a scribe to be seen not as one who interpreted information, but who merely recorded it for the public good."
In their fear of readers, ancients understood something we have forgotten about the magnitude of readership. Reading breeds the power of an independent mind. When we read well, we are thinking hard for ourselves—this is the essence of freedom. It is also the essence of editing. Editors are scribes liberated to not simply record and disseminate information, but think hard about it, interpret, and ultimately, influence it.”
― Susan Bell, The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself

“There is a saying: Genius is perseverance. While genius does not consist entirely of editing, without editing it's pretty useless.”
― Susan Bell, The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself

“Before we look at Perkins’s critique and Fitzgerald’s revision, I should say why I chose to discuss Gatsby and not another novel. In truth, the book chose me. When I read it on a whim to see how it matched Berg’s account of its making, I was floored. Every sentence and event felt necessary. Fitzgerald managed to fuse ultramodern prose—taut, symbolic, elliptical—with splendid lyricism: ornate, fluid descriptions of parties, for example, that rival Tolstoy’s descriptions of war. Gatsby is a case study of Flaubertian froideur—the cold that burns. Finally, and heroically, Fitzgerald maintained compassion for a humanity he portrayed in the most sinister terms.”
― Susan Bell, The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself

“Pragmatic and cool: You are possessed by the need to make your writing function. You consider yourself neither genius nor idiot. You edit like the French recommend exacting revenge: coldly.”
― Susan Bell, The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself

“W. H. Auden used to say, rather pungently, that he could only truly “see” a poem once it’s typed because “a man likes his own handwriting the way he likes the smell of his own farts.”
― Susan Bell, The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself

“If you control your reading too much, you cease to be involved in it.”
― Susan Bell, The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself

“Editing is a conversation, not a monologue”
― Susan Bell, The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself