October 2, 2006
Roger Angell on editing
In the New Yorker's online-only section this week is an interview with Roger Angell, who has just celebrated his fiftieth anniversary on the staff of the magazine and recently published Let Me Finish, a memoir. Here's his response to a question about editing:
Well, I don’t do as much editing as I once did. I used to read a lot of young writers, a lot of new writers, and I don’t do that anymore. We have a young and very talented fiction staff, and most writers are young, and I think that flood of fiction should be read by young people. If we’re close to buying something, sometimes I get asked to read a story, and I can say, “This is great,” if I think so, or “My God, you must be crazy.”I’m getting ready to do a New Yorker Festival appearance on a panel about editing. I’ve never talked about editing before. One of the things I’m going to say is that the first job of a fiction editor is to say no. You turn down a lot of bad stuff and a lot of pretty good stuff, too. This is the way it should be. What I used to love more than anything was to become aware of a young writer who hadn’t quite got it together yet, and to start sending stuff back, if I had to, but also say what I liked in the story. Sometimes you’d see writers beginning to understand what kind of a writer they were and what they could do, and as their capacities grew they might give us a story we could run. Not a New Yorker story—that’s the mistake everybody makes, that there is a New Yorker story—but the best this writer can do. You have to edit within their capabilities, particularly with fiction writers. The only thing Shawn ever told me in the way of advice—I put this into my book—was that it’s no great trick to edit a story and make it the greatest story ever written. He said, “Anybody can do that. It’s much harder to edit a story and help make it the best story this writer can write this week.”