magazine feature edits

Did an editor assign you this piece, or did you pitch it to them, and they accepted it?

If the piece you turned in is significantly different from what the magazine was expecting ... you'll likely have to either bite the bullet and edit it, or accept that it's not going to run. But if the magazine is going to run the article no matter what, you better have a hand in its editing -- otherwise an editor will change it around without your input, which would be even worse than if you have to do some rewrites yourself.

In any case, it does suck to have to change your article around, but if you approach the editor as a colleague rather an an adversary, you'll have a better chance of an outcome that you're both happy with. The editor's goal isn't to destroy your integrity -- it's to come up with a piece that's interesting but also fits in with the style of article that the magazine is known for. (Of course, if it's a not-so-well-known magazine, they might be open for more risk-taking -- you might have a better chance at keeping some of your original article's style.)

Give us more details!

cover the story. you fucking hack.

Less slogans and more facts, please...

I'll stop now.

being creative in your posts is one thing, but making up insane hypotheticals would would never, ever happen is another.

as an editor on a magazine, can i be the first to point out that: no it bloody doesn't? first of all, there are very few "people like" hunter s thompson (thank fuck). second: if we're paying someone a large amount of cash to write a feature, we'd appreciate it if, you know, they actually delivered that feature. otherwise they're going to, umm, end up on the spike.

yes, there's room for maverick talent (although such talent is sadly very rare). we're quite a straightforward, old-fashioned, readable magazine (that, perhaps, is why we won "british newspaper supplement of the year 2005") but we do encourage individualism where it will work, eg in travelogues. similarly, if we commission a brilliant writer who we know has a proven track record of wild and wonderful work, we expect something, er, wild and wonderful. most of the time, however, we don't.

bottom line: where 99.9% of features are concerned, it's the story that should be interesting, not the writer being a maverick. a good writer will use their style and flair and particular genius to make the story sing - but once they start writing about themselves and their opinions in the middle of a feature, they're going to feel the force of my editorial boot.

a fresh angle is always needed! and, er, that would be part of the brief we'd give a writer, every time. we discuss with them at some length how they're going to tackle a piece. what i'm moaning about is people who then turn in something completely different; something that's invariably shit.

don't get me wrong: if we got something through that wasn't what we asked for but happened to be the single best thing we'd ever read, we'd print it like a shot. this, however, has never happened. normally what we get is a writer trying to be far, far cleverer than they actually are, and falling flat on their arse in the process.

xpost -- yeah, it's a negotiating position. i'm not exactly Mr Successful, but still.

(anna spectacularly OTM.)

yet, of course, the problem is that's almost as bad! for every slab of oh-christ-what-is-this-fucker-on-about? maverick lunacy, we get two plodding pieces of hackwork that cover the right bases but do so with absolutely no flair or skill whatsoever. if it was up to me, i wouldn't re-hire some of these fuckers either ... but sadly it ain't :)

and, like i say, i'm lucky enough to work with some magnificent talents: people who just get it RIGHT, and turn in beautiful, beautiful copy that's a joy to read.

Ah excellent, so you need some American correspondents, then. ;-)

er, did i recommend this? no. but plenty of writers *you* admire were working at the limit of what editors would allow -- simon reynolds, for example, makes references to thinkers most eds would strike out.

There's a place for human interest features in a local rag - stories about people who have overcome a certain illness, for example, or have achieved something remarkable. It's bread-and-butter stuff for us "fucking hacks".

You can turn your nose up at this kind of journalism but it serves a purpose and it means something to the community and the readership to have their stories printed. If you wrote up the story of a lady who'd overcome cancer in some gonzo style ('She was somewhere outside her nursing home when the drugs began to take hold') it might amuse you in your desire to appear as a maverick talent but you'd never get printed or used again, not least because you'd be showing no sensitivity to your subject or the market.

the peice i wrote was critical of the magazine, it was ambigous, complicated, and did not answer questions as much as asked them

i would say that anthony was probably not "working at the limits of what editors would allow" and instead turned in a muddled piece.

i want to know more from anthony, i guess.

xpost.

god, yes, of course. but a) a surprising number of otherwise talented writers are very, very bad at this; and b) it's particularly galling when you, the commissioning editor, specifically tell a writer not to do this and they go ahead and do so anyway.

x-post to tingo: heh, parts of that rant are OT fucking M.

Where are these mavericks to which you cleave published? In the student newspaper? The editing process -- and writing what, y'know, you said you would -- exists because getting papers to press is a savage ballet and -- sorry primadonnas -- but (metaphor shift ahead)the writer is a cog in the machine.

Maverick writers turning up and filing 2,000 words of precious self-absorbed "different" writing is just like (back to metaphor one) the lead dancer deciding he'll go breakdance stage left when he should be catching some leaping ballerina.

The way to push boundaries in writing is not to try and sneak it under an editor's nose so that everything else stops while they spend four hours rewriting the drivel; it is -- as GF suggests -- to work with the editors, pitch appropriately, and consult with them on what you're wanting to write. Otherwise, you'll just get your copy flung back at you for rewrite. Or some sub will do it for you, which makes nobody happy.

xp to s'fox: word, again, i didn't say 'writing like hunter is good', more 'hunter was a great writer who didn't buckle down and who inspired lots of people'.

"Where are these mavericks to which you cleave published?"

well, nowhere, which might be why i never buy any magazines.

He did buckle down, actually, and spent a number of years working as a South American freelancer. His "break" came when he pitched the Nation with a story about bike gangs. The editors knew what they were getting, and got it. "Buckling down" has nothing to do with what you write, but if you keep fighting the people who're publishing you, they'll stop publishing you. Which is presumably why you can't find any of the writing you like in magazines. (Though Hunter S. was published in Vanity Fair not long before he died.)

xpost: anthony, post yr brief here as well if you do that.

no, these were the "british press awards 2005". try again :)

right now, i'm toiling with another kind of horror: the writer who plays fast and loose with the facts over the course of 3,700 words. this is fucking drivel and i'm going to have to get my head down and get on with it. back later :)

is annoying/frustrating to have to revise something? initially, yes, usually, somewhat. but think about it -- if the process results in the piece being easier to understand and clearer, everyone wins, and perhaps the writer learns a thing or three. also -- and i say this as someone who's worked with prolly two dozen editors in my life -- consider that the editor didn't have to return the piece to you at all for changes, he/she could have just made the changes he/she saw fit, resulting in something totally opposite from what you intended.

the thing is that in journalism one has to be willing and able to divorce one's ego from the work somewhat.

Saying things in a simple and engaging fashion is a lot harder than flinging around out-there references and purple prose.

Plus: nice one on the job Jess.

Yeah, it's kind of amazing how far that can get you. I work all day with copy written by experienced reporters/writers, which has often already gone through a few layers of editing, and a depressing percentage of it is still muddled and/or traffics in cliches, generalizations and tortured sentence structures. In my own writing these days, I find myself taking out more and more and more. I've kind of realized you only need a couple nice turns of phrase to move a story forward, and a lot of the connecting tissue needs to be just as plain and functional as possible.

Saying things in a simple and engaging fashion is a lot harder than flinging around out-there references and purple prose.

entirely depends what you're trying to say, but a complex idea is a complex idea, and eds are often against these.

i am all for complex ideas in context. music writing doesn't attract a lot of heavy thinkers tho, and usually i'm not so bummed about that, since my own efforts in that regard are uniformly lousy in the same "wanky undergrad jerkoff bullshit" that most people's are.

i've missed the part of the thread where anyone said 'oh god, these editors are so lame, cutting out all the waffle.' no-one likes waffle, purple prose, self-obsessed prima donnas blah-blah-blah, so i'm not sure where the argument is coming from.

In my experience complex important ideas about music are things you arrive at as a listener from living with music, not so much from reading about it - print music journalism is understandably rooted in day-to-day reaction to new music, and it's simply not an appropriate place for a lot of more philosophical or reflective writing.
-- Tom (freakytrigge...)

i kind of had you down as a fan of simon reynolds, tom.

Also a lot of them are in books, which I sort of wasn't counting, though clean prose and good editing are still vital.

my favourite experience for this was a mercuy rev feature circa deserter's song, for a Now Defunct UK rock weekly. was really proud of my first draft, but the features editor dismissed it out of hand. after a couple of further drafts, where i attempted to cleave to his most vague of complaints about the piece, i was dragged into the office to rewrite it there (not quite sure why, beyond the purposes of humiliation). i'd just started writing for the Times, in addition to this weekly paper, and the features editor kept making nasty comments about how i was writing for them now, and had to conform to *his style of writing. i reckon i turned in 8 drafts before it was okayed for pressing - or, to be more accurate, 7, as after the 7th rejection i realised this cunt was just fucking with my feature to mess with my head. the 8th, final, successful submission was, in fact, my first draft, intact. and the editor responded by praising it and asking me why i couldn't have written it like that in the first place (i know this seems far-fetched, please understand the hell i was working in at the time.)

i mean, sometimes editors are shit, you know? to pretend any flux in the rewriting process is only ever the fault of wack writers trying to play bangs or bukowski is just fucken stupid.

the biggest insights wrt music are generally the little, personal ones. then it's just a matter of framing them so they're relevant to others. BIG IDEAS don't often translate so well becauyse you need to spend time with music in order to get to them and often the amount of time available between listening and writing isn't great enough to allow for this. also highminded philosophical stuff isn't necessarily suited to the majority of papers out there and, for me, criticism isn't really about that ego-flexing bullshit, it's about making something universal and putting stuff into a language people understand (as often as not literally in my case)

Complex ideas can be explained in clear language. Scratch that "can," they have to be explained in clear language, or else no one will have any hope of understanding them. Coming back to Ambrose Bierce: "Good writing is clear thinking made visible."

this is a lame, barely thought-through piece which deals with very complex ideas of social determination of artistic/industrial production.

to write on this subject--which is interesting--needs more than what this guy brings to it. there's no wit, no style, no ideas here, but hey, at least he doesn't say 'i' or mention barthes or whatever. greatness.

i disagree about reynolds ideas being all that simple.

Sure, but clear =/= simple. Clear writing can use big words and deal in complicated concepts. But it has to explain as it goes and build its ideas carefully. I think there's a tendency for writers (especially in cultural criticism and suchwhat) to take the complexity of their ideas as an excuse for convoluted prose, which can disguise ideas that have only been half-thought-out. Sometimes that's part of the writing process -- I've gotten to the end of a paragraph sometimes before I figured out what I was actually trying to say. But once you figure it out, you need to go back and rewrite and clean up the often winding path you took to get there, because it's a lot to expect a reader to follow.

xpost gypsy mothra OTM.

i've worked with awful editors, and also really great ones. i can tell the difference now!

i pitched a story about agriculture queens in the midwest for bitch magazine, and after doing my research i found out that the old dichtomies, about them being just meat were not true, that they were really a different kind of femminism. i wrote this, i wrote about having my expecations shattered, i wrote about the several levels that these queens worked on, and i also did not buy the line that they were being exploited.

because i felt so ambigous about the peice, i put it into peices, but she said over and over again, well you are wrong about femminsim, or you are ignoring the patriachy, or we want more information where more information could not be acheived, and also i think what she wanted was cute little vingettes about farm girls, instead i wrote a peice that was critical of the coastal elite, of femminism that ignores it, and wrote about how much abuse i got when i called the flyover working for bitch.

the peice is not random, and its not really at all HST, for one my authorial voice is pretty much directed outside.

i would not normally bite the hands that feed me but
a) the research led me in that direction
b) the magazine claims itself to be maverick.

(btw i did check spelling and grammar)

there are things i have to change in the story, and i have always made any edits asked of me, i am not the kind of writer who wrings his hands and says every word i ever write is precious.

"The mainstream is more interesting than you think" kind of stories need to be pitched as such from the beginning, I'd guess.

an agriculture queen is someone that a community of growers and producers elect to represent(sp) their spec. kind of food, on a local, state or national level.

Isn't Ruth Reichl the editor of Gourmet now? She's pretty interesting. I mean, hiring DFW in the first place was pretty interesting for Gourmet. I'll have to track down that article, I tend to like DFW's magazine pieces more than anything else he does.

this ties in with a point that annoys me but is trotted out often that it is much harder to write something clear and readable than touched and a bit loopy - I'm not sure it is, but I concede that two of my favourite writers on music (sherburne & finney) are masters of the clear, novel prose (jess too, although I go to him more fr the aspy-ness) (hi jess)

but of my other favourite writers on music are prone to out there references and purple prose or out there references and purple prose or and then there's dave tompkins...

there's a lot of conservative bullshit written about writing too - while as much as I dislike the childishness ("the aesthetic level of the child" I believe it's been called) of standard issue believer writing, I'll take its expansiveness and attitude over this commodity-based nonsense

OTFM

There are far too many people who think they can write like thompson, etc. when they're just cringe-inducingly bad. There's really nothing more painful to read than the musings of a gonzo wannabe.

I think a lot of magazines would have a hard time with a piece that lectures the readers about how agriculture queens are feminist, especially coming from a male writer.

But loopy, not to say touched, not to say tetchy, also does not sit in opposition to clear. The Kogan and Sinker pieces linked above are full of clarity in both thought and word. They couldn't build those concatenous structures of allusion and cross-reference without it. I agree that they take more work than your A to B to C-type prose -- and I also think most of us are better off striving for A-B-C, because Kogan-style acrobatics are hard (especially when it comes to sticking the landing). But sure, done well, that kind of thing can be thrilling for those open to its thrills, in a way that less ambitious prose rarely is.

There's this one editor for Loose Lips Sink Ships who's HORRIBLE...wait, no. ;-)

Good luck getting anything published for Bitch that hinges on an argument outside of their particular brand of feminism. Bitch has a point of view, and as "maverick" as they claim to be, they don't typically publish articles that stray from their point of view. If you want your piece published, change it or send it to someone else.

arf! ned, i'm a terrible editor... i don't give assignments, i just say 'write about so and so' and rely upon the fact that i only comission writers i trust, so therefore they can't go far wrong. it's like my approach to cookery - if your ingredients are good, you don't have to be fussy in the preparation.

I have to say, this doesn't sound like a terribly intriguing premise for a story. Reading about someone's expectations being dashed might work if the writer is already a well-known commodity or if they're commonly held expectations, but this is a pretty obscure subject for that.

This article seems to suggest they ARE dying.

i would like to reitarate(sp), this is no where near kogan/sinkah territory.

you'd like to believe this, and it's *kind of* true, inasmuch as most self-styled mavericks are anything but, plenty of mavericks are self-conscious enough to style themselves as such. unless you believe in 'natural' untrammelled genius that just does what it does becasue that's how it feels, i don't really see this as a big problem. it's schtick, same way music writers bringing in basically irrelevant philisophical concepts/critical theory is (sometimes enjoyable) schtick.

this ties in with a point that annoys me but is trotted out often that it is much harder to write something clear and readable than touched and a bit loopy - I'm not sure it is, but I concede that two of my favourite writers on music (sherburne & finney) are masters of the clear, novel prose [...] but of my other favourite writers on music are prone to out there references and purple prose

this is all some distance from whether or not a writer is a 'cog in a machine' as was argued upthread. i can imagine a perfectly lucid piece getting turned down for its difficult content, just as i can imagine a convoluted, purply, but basically prosaic (ideas-wise) piece getting accepted. i don't think sinker does make 'out-there' references anyway, but references of any kind care people.

i don't get all the gonzo hate here--it seems weirdly out of proportion. of course wannabe hunters can be excruciating, but ye gods the popular press is mediocre enough. i have a nagging sympathy for anyone willing to disrupt it.

yes, genius argument. but maybe over 2,000wds basic s-v-o sentences might get a bit monotonous? often you can use fewer words overall by writing longer sentences, two. i think that's why they invented pronouns.

i don't get all the gonzo hate here--it seems weirdly out of proportion. of course wannabe hunters can be excruciating, but ye gods the popular press is mediocre enough. i have a nagging sympathy for anyone willing to disrupt it.

I think this is a function of
(a) bad Hunterism being seen (rightly) as a phase a lot of writers go through on their way to developing their own voice, especially since a lot of writers, including the ones expressing their distaste for it, tried it themselves with less than satisfying results (I certainly did; it was mercifully brief and none of it survives),
(b) there being a lot of people here who write professionally at least some of the the time and have come to realize just how difficult (and rewarding, simply as writing though sometimes in monetary terms too, it has to be said) writing clearly and concisely can be,
(c) there being a few editors here as well who know just how bad pseudo-Hunterism can get based on queries we've received.

there being a lot of people here who write professionally at least some of the the time and have come to realize just how difficult (and rewarding, simply as writing though sometimes in monetary terms too, it has to be said) writing clearly and concisely can be

i kind of know what you mean--as i said, since i stopped being a student writer i've put hella effort into not peppering my stuff with irrelevant refs, having some kind of 'line', blah blah blah.

and it's difficult (this is partly a function of low wordcounts--by the time you said who's in a film and what the basic plot is, ect, you'll have all of 100wds of a 250wd review to get over something that isn't in the publicity material).

but partly as a reaction against this, i now find myself craving something more way out (in others if not myself). i think the reaction against gonzo has gone too far! maybe.

[also: when is hunter not clear or concise? he set out to write like hemingway...]

x-post with Matos.

A surefire way to produce bad copy is to try and ape the style of someone you admire. It'll never work. Inspiration is one thing, but a quick flick though any student newspaper will produce countless examples of someone who has a Fear and Loathing film poster on their wall and thinks it makes them an original thinker.

I wish people would try and find their own voice more often. I know it's difficult and it takes time, but the results tend to be worth it.

just don't make yr web too diaphonous!

N_RQ I tried to send you a 'webmail', did it work?

love and kisses

*dies from the irony*