On (Good) Editors

That thing I wrote for OnSite came back with the editors comments. The email said, "My questions, comments, corrections are in red." I opened the attached file expecting to see a blood-bath and found two questions, one sentence each. As a result I have to re-write almost the whole thing. Not because the questions were general and / or mean. They were very specific and seemed very easy to answer. I sat down at 9 this morning thinking, "I can polish this off in about ten minutes." It's now 2:30 - five and a half hours of constant writing, looking things up, reading stuff, more writing, cutting things, re-writing, editing, changes, looking more stuff up...

I have a huge admiration for people who can do that - ask the perfect question. It is the one talent that separates great critics from mediocre ones. There are only a few people I know who can do it. And whenever I get a chance to work with them, I take it. It's something I have tried to cultivate in myself, with very little in the way of results. I'm still the person who thinks of the perfect thing to say three days later and is then tortured by the knowledge it was too fucking late.

By the way, when I say (write) I have been writing for five and a half hours, I don't mean in the super-fast, prayerful, non-productive way I described a few entries ago. I have been wringing individual words from my brain and weighing them carefully for since 9 this morning. It's fucking exhausting. Is 'notes' better or worse than 'identifies'? Did he 'collect' them or 'curate' them? Which is more correct - 'interpolate', 'calculate', or 'insert'?

The really great question makes you feel like a dunce two hours later. It humiliates you but it waits until you are alone to do it. Perhaps humiliate isn't the right word. It reveals to you the extent of your ignorance and, if the question is really really great, points you in the direction of the answer.

For some reason, possibly to do with spending a substantial amount of time at NASA's jet propulsion laboratory website recently and associating all things space with Neil deGrasse Tyson, I was thinking about Isaac Newton. Why was I on the jet propulsion lab's website? Because the latest terrain model used by Google Maps and Google Earth was produced by the space shuttle shooting microwaves at the surface of the Earth from two sources (60m apart) and is accurate to 0m (90% certainty) in altitude and generated a point on a 15m grid covering the entire planet from 60º N to 60º S. Everyone knows Sir Isaac was a intellectual badass. Optics, the orbits of the planets, gravity, calculus, the theory of money (he was in charge of the English mint), and a whole lot of stuff that was probably very intelligent about alchemy. But he was also a kick-ass question asker. When everyone else was wondering why snowflakes are all different, he was wondering why, given the all snowflakes are different, all the arms of any given snowflake are all the same. Which, when you think about it, is a much better question. Not only is it weirder, it also leads in the direction of the answer. Although, in fairness, that part about the answer might be either an accident or an illusion caused by my almost complete ignorance of how snowflakes work. I think it's similar to crystals and I know a bit about those from reading Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle.

So, what's the result re my (what I hoped ought be brief but turned out to be dramatic) rethink of my short essay? An actual idea that goes from beginning to end and makes sense. Which is good. Except that it was supposed to already have that when I submitted it at the end of last month and it didn't really (although I thought it did). Which is bad. I suspect that, as a result, I have about four or five more hours of re-writing to do. I am starting to feel very thankful I didn't choose a career in journalism. And even starting to feel a little bad about all the vicious insults I have tossed at the Star's architecture columnists over the last couple years. I don't think they are any more right than I did before. They aren't. They remain wrong in general and in detail. But I acknowledge the difficulty in finding someone who can meet deadlines, write intelligently, and produce architecture criticism worth reading.

As for editing, I wouldn't be very good at it. I have difficulty restraining myself from rewriting the thing myself. Poor diction drives me nuts. And I am too impatient to think of really good questions (even if I had the ability, which I probably don't). My questions are typically limited to: "Really?", "Are you sure you mean this?", and "What the fuck is this supposed to mean?"