How Editors Know if Your Writing Is Good

i want to cut right to the chase here how do the two of you know when a piece of writing is a piece of good writing as editors you mean well first of all as editors yeah um to me i feel as if when i'm reading a piece whether it's been published or not i when i when i'm reading a piece of non-fiction and i'm transported into another world and i can see the characters move around i can hear them talk when the dialogue rolls out on the page and i forget that i'm reading i forget there's a writer delivering information to me i just feel immersed in that world to me that is good writing victor well it depends i mean what we're doing here in banff i agree with a lot of what you're saying and i want to know where a story is going i want it to engage me all those things but i certainly at the globe where you're dealing with somewhat smaller stories although sometimes fairly complicated you often don't have a lot of you certainly don't have the luxury of four weeks to work on them you sometimes have three hours when you need eight you sometimes have to eat when you need 16. um i mean the first thing i think is just am i able to follow the story and is it clear and interesting and i think you really have to decide that on a first read through i think if it's mush and muddy on the first time through there's two ways of making a clearer to keep reading it till you finally understand it or to talk to the writer and say i'm not getting this and you know your your job is you represent the reader you you're in a kind of a somewhat an adversarial position with a writer so what i ultimate you know what i initially look for and what makes most sense what what i need is reading through it being engaged understanding where it's going wherever it's going off the rails i i need to you know determine right away and you know maybe my standards are low but that's what i want how fast can you tell i ask because um i once uh had a chat with ale kennedy who's a a young writer in young she was young she's she's younger than me uh in scotland she's won the booker prize in various other prizes she's a very good writer and i she had been on the jury of the booker prize and i said to her that's a lot of books she's 180 books or 220 books how do you possibly read 220 books and she said well you can tell of course uh right away and i said i'll wait a couple of chapters and she said no no no no and i said well what what do you mean and she said what about eight and i said eight eight eight pages she said no i mean eight lines eight lines you can tell whether a book is good enough to read that's cutthroat you know one year on not wrong but cut through that's right once uh on cbc on sheila rogers show on cbc the next chapter well i i suggested with the giller uh that year or perhaps it was governor general i apologize chief it was it wasn't the year you were nominated i believe was the giller though we want to do a thing about the giller and i said well a to really you know get into it and read the whole book blah blah it's going to be a lot kind of heavy everybody's doing it why don't i read the first chapters and predict from just the first chapters and producers who of course these days are looking for easier and funner things said why don't you just read the first paragraph and predict so i read only the first paragraph of the five books and i predicted correctly and the globe had its usual three-person panel of scholarly literary people they didn't get it right so there might be something to that i read four or five sentences and i knew who would win does that applaud you sure if you by the way if you read the first paragraph of her short story collection it is a wonderful first paragraph i read it this winter oh yeah so i would have been able to sorry as a writer i feel offended but as a reader i feel as if they're maybe not in eight lines eight the first chapter in eight pages there's something that we can tell about uh the sensibility of the person behind the writing and people in the industry like to call it voice you know agents go crazy oh this book has such an incredible voice and yet no one can really define what that is but there's a wisdom there maybe there's some humor maybe there's um some vulnerability but anyway there's the sense that the writer is being completely frank with their audience and yet at the same time they're completely in control and utterly trustworthy to me anyway the reason i asked these questions is i'm fascinated by this current of feeling that's going around these days and you see it everywhere i mean and every day i i read somebody who says something like this that this notion that anybody can be a writer and that in fact with the internet with electronic communication that anybody everybody is uh a writer that and that that in fact um uh the idea that some people are better writers than others uh and that there is good writing and bad writing is in fact on the way there is writing and if people read it that's good writing uh so if there's somebody with two million hits on the website and old um you know uh i don't know shame as he heaney's only getting 50. they're better than sheamus heaney what do you make of that idea i don't know in some ways i mean you know other art forms have had this debate for a long time right way more people like madonna or beyonce then go to a wagner opera and of course people who love wagner will say well they're not the same thing and these people are there's mind control going on and advertising and all those things which there's somewhat is there isn't wagner as well but that's true that's true um i mean i think it's an interesting question because i think in some ways the internet is making you know the mainstream media confront the notion that because we now don't control the gates we don't you know you don't have a rich family funding a newspaper you can have a blog you can have you know all kinds of babble going on on the web that if people get the mark get the audience who are we to say you're getting more readers than i'm getting and i'm at the globe and mail how can i say what you're doing isn't right or isn't as good i do think there's a lot of unedited writing out there is the problem i have so you really have to wade through so much to get to good stuff and i'm not saying everything i have to edit everything or even you know everything has to be edited with an inch of its life but i think there's so much out there that something that is served by tradition and by editing and by you know asking for voice and style and sensibility and clarity is that you save people a lot of money and but i guess also there's in some ways there's not that much there are audiences these days for things beyond that there's a lot of i think people who maybe you know teenagers or people in their 20s who weren't brought up reading kind of mainstream media things and maybe don't even expect to have clarity or speed or anything and people can just kind of go on and on and on they're happy to read it if it's something mindless they like charlotte i think there's i mean i don't want to make it seem as if the only people who can be writers are the ones who graduate from journalism school or that graduate with mfas and have this extensive training because i have seen people learn how to write before my very eyes i was a bad writer i make bad sentences all the time and i improve them and there's something about writing on the internet that disguises the fact that good writing takes a lot of drafts a lot of time a lot of revision and because it's so fast there's a very short lead between typing something and publishing it it uh quickens the whole experience of writing so how do you know when a good subject comes along either for you or for a writer that you're editing and we're at ubc it's just an intuition really it's just uh just a feeling it's just an intuition there's something it depends on the writer really i've seen people write about trips to the dentist and they're absolutely electrifying and then i've seen people write about car crashes and war zones and they're completely dull so if there's energy there for the writer and the way that they've captured the events the way that they've captured the idea is uh amusing or appealing and it holds my attention then it's a really good idea but in the hands of another writer it might be a terrible idea i mean what do you find with you write all the time you're dealing with editors and story meetings and changing demands people wanting you to write for the web more probably at the paper you've probably noticed a big change waiting for the web i've cultivated a reputation for incompetence intentionally yes i know i'm well aware of that believe me i'm an editor of the glow but but the pressure to do it what the the difference in maybe the last 10 years at the kind of stories they want you to do are you noticing that are they more in are they less or do they let you come up with what you want is there more sensors you know not censorship but censure if it's not what they think some kind of online buzzy audience wants it is true an editor came up to me at the globe and mail recently and said we were wondering if you'd if you could do a quick piece about the meaning of violence and um how many words like 250 i think it was 900 or 1200 words and i can barely say hello in 1200 words but and i did think to myself you know i wonder where that came from and in investigating i discovered that they had done some readership surveys and they'd learned that uh violence is a subject that people will read about you get a lot of it's i think it's called click bait i'm not i think that's the word isn't that click bait yeah and that in fact there is more and more of this being done in fact the headlines of the globe and mail are passed through some kind of rube goldberg meat grinding they even do a thing where they'll put a headline for three hours and then a headline for three hours like the same story new headline same story new headline and then they'll sit us down and have us guess which headline got the best yeah it's like what a game show and then who got the best guesses and then what are we learning from these headlines yeah yeah so i don't understand why every headline isn't bieber me this harper is an [ __ ] or you know whatever it is you want to get them to read pardon my language i thank you catch on eventually you have to have a little variety yeah about harper or about b well either yeah well i mean i do not unders i don't think you can predict what people will react to because i don't think that i mean as intel i mean these this is one of the most intelligent audiences people encounter i don't think with all due respect to you that most of you know what is going to interest you before you come upon the thing that interests you because it's a mystery what interesting i mean that is a deeply held religious belief on my part it's not based in fact it's it's a i guess based on experience but i i do not understand this predictive you can tell what's going to be interesting and i think a lot of young people might laugh me out of the room for saying that you can't do that well i think a lot of really smart intelligent consumers of media and writing in general they also click on click bait i mean i don't know how many times i've caught myself look at looking at you know dolphins swimming in circles or elephants weeping like we all do it we all click on that clickbait but it doesn't mean necessarily that we think it's a great idea it is however being used by the new uh i call them the engineer editors the metrics people who are now using that to tell us what we can read well i think there's also there is a real a kind of low level and sometimes median level panic going on i mean clicks mean so much and advertisers do want to see clicks and there's also like on you know on any web page of even you know mainstream newspaper there are some stories there where there's been a kind of implicit promise or hope of clicks that advertisers have been told about like you know stories are there because we're hoping there will be clicks and because if you click on that story there's certain advertisers so we're hoping people will read those i mean in the old days there wasn't that pressure and it's stunning it's not really if we're not really deceiving anyone it's not that we said it's the only story you can read but it got placement up there with the other stories and you know it might be about you know maybe there's a small business advertiser who wants and it's a story about the ten big foibles of starting a small business and that kind of thing gets clicks because it's a list we have a certain number of readers who read that and so we're kind of pushing it on to people because i think we need to get those clicks like there are editors of the globe now not not i'm not one of them but in more kind of businessy sections and not the mainstream rob section but sub little sections that have been created who do kind of part of their duties is to generate a certain number of clicks on the stories they're editing so they are assigning stories that they know will bring some kind of metric in they're editing them in a way that are the top of the story will catch people they're putting a headline on them for that and they're placing them on the web page like that and they're genuine stories they're good stories often but there is this kind of thing going on where we need the clicks if we're going to pay the bills and ultimately it changes the mix of the page it changes what the globe's offering it changes how the stories are written it changes all those things so how then is it different if i'm putting if it's somebody at the cbc say on the website or at the globe and mail or any other you know fine journalistic establishment decides to put something on the web because it's getting getting a lot of clicks how is that different from a story that this is a big issue in in journalism these days amongst uh amongst writers of non-fiction how is that different from having your story sponsored by an advertiser and kind of a little bit adapting your story to what the advertiser wants what's the difference i mean you're both what you're doing is selling the page and you're selling it in a corrupt way well are you pressured to do that at all and have you like do you have lines you've drawn or is your line simply don't talk to me about that i have um i don't think i've i've written a story that has been sponsored have you ever found that you've written a story because for instance there will be situations where uh let's say a company that makes some kind of product geared to women and i know there's been situations where they'll say what we'd like is a pull out section just about women who are doing well in a certain field that's it that's the only thing we're asking we don't need to see the stories we want to have our ads in there because we want women i don't know all the reasons psychologically connecting our ads with women doing well in certain fields or we think it'll just bring those eyeballs to the section has your stuff ever do you know discovered later or ever been run in sections like that where your story wouldn't have existed had the advertiser not sponsored the section there's no pressure on you that's the thinnest edge of the wedge i think that might have happened but i don't i didn't know anything about it and i don't think it is the thin edge of the wedge because it's no different than i mean if you say we've got a big story coming up and so and so you know victor's written a great story about grammar it's a ten thousand word story takes up the whole the whole section it's a totally different that would just obviously be a good story i no but it is different because in the old days you'd have a story meaning you decide what is new newsworthy now that's influenced we need to come up with seven stories about women who are doing well in science and the arts so those stories wouldn't have been in the paper without it so i'd say it is a thin edge because it's influencing the story lineup and what i was talking about is an edit is a a company saying i want three pages of great writing yeah and i just want to put my name on it right i don't think that's influence is it okay well do you i don't know do you do they ever ask for all we want is great writing no they don't give you any more direction isn't that them just you wouldn't do it if they asked for any direction if they said if they hope if they showed up in your office you tell them to go to hell right and and he wouldn't write the story yeah well i mean there are all kinds of levels and right now the big one is this branded content which is content that kind of is connected to a brand and some people feel not clearly enough demarcated from the regular stuff but then there's all kinds of layers in between that the issue is that the globe and mail the managers the publisher and the owner want to be able to tell a journalist to change the story to satisfy the publisher and i think if you do that you're no longer a newspaper i mean the globe and mail is 140 years old they've been allegedly developing a brand of independence and you can actually read it thinking that maybe it speaks for itself and have you got to give that away for 20 cents see you're like a name at the globe i'm as i'll our all editors are i've taken my vow of anonymity you as gately has called it you your name is kind of you of a lot invested in your name if it in fact becomes the case that there we get a contract that says you have to write branded content i'd leave yeah i guess my the the question i wanted to ask before before we got distracted by was how much responsibility do they have as readers i mean maybe they shouldn't be clicking on bait maybe you shouldn't maybe you should you should think about the consequences of that maybe they should you know stand up for the independence of as opposed to just give in to that oozy if i might kind of word masturbatory feeling of of just doing what's there in front of you i mean do you think the reader has a responsibility to the production of great writing well either they continue to read the paper and just click away or they go to another news source i mean there are plenty of other outlets that don't really they still print news um and you know i've moved around quite a bit in the last couple of years just looking for news from around the world which seems harder and harder to get in canada [Music] i think people are very versatile and flexible when they're reading their news i want to change the subject what made you want to be a writer do you remember was there a particular piece of work an instance that you remember well i decided i wanted to be a writer pretty young so i don't ever remember having other aspirations and i think probably many writers have that sense even if it's kind of retroactive that really there was something about storytelling that they really liked or there was something about seeing the world in that way so that ideas are very closely attached to the words that you write in a way it's almost as if you don't have the thoughts before you write them down so uh to me the the two things were really married together really early and i think i became an adult thinking myself in that way even if it took a long time to learn how and to get published as i think a great many writers there's plenty of writers in the audience i know it takes a long time to get good it takes a lot to get time to get published and there's a difference there between you know knowing you want to do it and finding some purchase in the world that way so in other words it sounds like you're saying it has to be its own reward for you to really take on the huge everyone's different i think some people have really incredible stories than that they know they want to tell like they're just bubbling to get out of them and they just start making sentences and before they know it they've got pages and pages what what made you want to do it well really i don't write all that much i mean mostly i edit and i really became an editor i hate to say it but kind of to pay the bills i mean i had finished university as you mentioned it was in social and political thought at you just weren't that many jobs at york very fine university york university and um my ba is from queens he went he is by just by the way just a general ba from the university of toronto [Laughter] how embarrassing is that but uh no it was guy i mean it's not york that's for sure it seemed like a great job and it was a great job but it is funny all these years later like i've been editing for a lot a long time and i do love the job and there's a lot of interesting stuff and i love working with writers and i mean compared to so many jobs it's a wonderful job it really is but there are days you just think can you not just write this clearly in the first place like you know why do i have to add to you how many times have i edited you how many times have we been through this i know people are on deadline and that's a big issue more and more i think our writers are writing for the web they're writing 24 7 they're writing you know blogs are often under pressure too they're writing for us they're writing features you know we've downsized twice in the last few years again because people are clicking on you know huffington post top 10 cutest dogs and our advertisers want clicks and so i'm getting work from very high you know pressured people and i'm having to edit it under more pressure circumstances in some ways it's been fun because i'm doing more than i've had to do and i haven't do it in a different way but there are days yeah you just think just write it in english write it clearly say what you're going to say say you've said it say you've said it and let's publish it but it just is unending you know the the need for editing which keeps me so far in business do you think it's people are needing less editing and are they responding to it i've heard that people resist editing more now um you know it just depends i think there are more cases where people are their fuses are shorter because they're so busy and they just don't have time to be edited and you know it's always been the situation probably everywhere but certainly at the globe where a story will have one idea from some higher up and then it morphs at a story meeting and then a poor writer gets it who didn't even want it or some other writer thought of it but they're too busy someone's stuck writing it it gets edited by someone else it gets bumped out of the focus section because they didn't have room and it comes to arts and i get it and i think it should be something else and you know there's just some kind of meltdown happens i think more you know that happens occasionally i find more often now it's people are just thrilled if you're willing to edit them because they don't have time sometimes to do it properly and it is their byline it's your byline on there i'm anonymous so they're happy that i you know have saved them often do you think that the days are over for the my favorite kind of story i'm reading i see something i pick it up i start reading a story it's beautifully written but it can be about anything and i'm there for hours you know three hours go by and i've read uh forty thousand words fifty thousand words seventy thousand words on uh oranges just because it happened to be told by a very skillful uh storyteller in that case john mcphee but do you think that's gone now no it's not gone and anyone who's got a subscription to a website like long reads or any of these other ones there are so many long long form journalism pieces out there floating around and there are people reading them but we are in an industry that's going through a giant convulsion right now and it's almost difficult to see because we're right in the middle of it people don't want to pay for their what they they're reading material and there's no real way yet to monetize it uh because the old models are desperate failing you know so until everybody gets that all figured out i think it's going to feel quite stressful to anyone who publishes the stuff or writes it the the money if if any if anyone's a freelancer the money has really just taken a nosedive to the point where you can't invest the time anymore you have to go and do other things in order to make living because they're so infrequent those paychecks so at worst i think a whole generation of people will be discouraged from taking on those kinds of projects but i think we've always told stories and we'll always continue to tell stories they just may not be in the form that we're used to although i do think there is i mean you you said earlier should readers be responsible for a lot of the fabulom that's out there i do think you know i lament how many probably great stories aren't being told now because people can't afford to tell them you know if you're doing it for 10 cents a word when you used to get a dollar or 75 cents and you know that can happen like a great magazine like mesonerve you know some of our writers have been published in it and it looks beautiful and they win a national magazine award but they have to live with the fact that they're going to get almost nothing per word to do it and you know so i you know but they had the help of banff but if you don't if you don't have a patron and you don't have the money uh you know there's i think there's lots of stories just evaporating and when you combine that with kind of the pressure on mass media to please advertisers you do i think get you know this real diminution of great investigative things happening investigated broadly like all our eight writers are basically doing investigative work an investigative like watergate where things slip through a patron is an interesting idea you mean an individual patient patron uh if you have one i mean you know you know lorenzo giving him some dough so he could write that kind of thing yeah yeah or i mean it's interesting how many people i've worked with who have rich husbands or rich wives you know it's not unusual for people at the globe to have a and it could be a coincidence but they have a high power lawyer husband they have an investor husband they have you know those people who are reported on an rob and then these people have the luxury of writing about things that otherwise you know they never would be able to whether it's visual arts or architecture or investigative stuff but a lot of i find maybe it's like that everywhere but there's a lot of people who actually have some other source of income in a relationship we're able to do it anymore not you know not always but sometimes i think yeah are people from rich families do i have a return is that how you do you have a rich husband not the last time i checked it's easier to have someone write about what they know as opposed to finding out what we need to know because it is very expensive for sure i mean i want to single at the globe i think in new sections that is somewhat the way yeah i i mean i'm writing two memoirs because i i there are subjects i want to write about and and one of them may not turn out to be a memoir so much as an investigation of age of a certain age which would be an investigative subject yeah and what victor says is right there's a lot of that you know get them to i mean christy blachford is a good example of this you know blachford is a very good reporter i mean just just she's like she has a bulldog and is a bulldog i mean a lovely bulldog you know just like a she's a threshing machine you know like that intellectually it just sucks it in and can stream it out but uh she is often asked to put a personal spin on things and so you know you get those things she does where she goes but about a boy that she wrote for six months every fifth sentence was but a boy or about her bulldog she's written quite a bit she's written about her dog he's written about her father you know in perhaps not what one would call investigative ways i guess it is a bit of a a bit of a follow but you know these are writers too they i mean they write about what they want to write about it's a and you know i don't know the new yorker in the magazine i mean the blog i find suffers but they pay 250 for a blog no matter who writes it 250 bucks seymour hirsch on the blog 250 bucks in the magazine they pay three dollars a word you know right you write a 5 000 word piece that's 15 000 you can live for a couple of months on 15 grand i was shocked last year when calvin trillan was here and i don't think he said it when we were in the public event but he was he wrote a piece he normally gets i think nine thousand dollars for three thousand thousand words three thousand or something and they looked at and they said no it's not for the magazine we'll put it on the blog maybe he said what do i get for the blog 250 a calvin trillin same piece they just don't budge and i definitely noticed that on the blog it's it's just not the magazine and i think again it's that phenomenon they're wanting to people they're wanting people to do volunteer work i mean i've said that to people excuse me in this car at work i'm sometimes asked to you know work extra hours and do stuff because we're shortstop and what i've said to editors above me there is i like to restrict my charitable giving to non-profit organizations but as writers i think you really see it it's sort of like you're lucky to be you know printed and you know people can't live on luck yeah and so you don't and then i think there's a step up even with the investigative stuff because yeah that's hard stuff and it's very hard to do freelance if you don't have someone backing you because there's all kinds of legal issues when you're going after powerful people charlotte i'd be interested in hearing your answer to that question though um i think it's a false dichotomy between memoir and investigative journalism because there's you know the genre is gigantic and if someone is present in the story that doesn't mean they're not investigating it doesn't mean they're not doing any hard research there are memoir pieces that are completely deep and thorough and very informative and then there are investigative pieces that are you know light as air so in a way i feel like this this it's a spectrum and these these kind these ways of writing are always sort of blending in with each other and if they're just modalities and sometimes you need one and sometimes you need the other um you know i know i spent a whole year doing research and you know going through conifer reproduction textbooks and it's a memoir so you know i didn't feel like i was writing a memoir at that point but the publishers got to slap a label on it somewhere so they know where to put it in the bookstore or they know what to label it when it's published in the magazine which is not to say that there's not a great need for intensive reporting but you know it's hard to get to get three thousand words in the globe and mail i i practically have to marry julie travis right you know and did she ask you no she's not my type but i mean she's a lovely person and smart you know but but you're already married too you know that man yeah and i'm already married yeah but for for an extra thousand words i'd do anything you know i i i'd commit bigamy for that but i mean you have no idea how difficult it is i mean to get 2500 words which i mean any investigation that you're going to actually want to read has to be told a bit as a story and therefore it needs a little extra space for a few scenes a little character develop you know whatever you you throw in there several years ago uh pete power the photographer and i had said why don't you send us up north for two months in the summer uh you know when when it's habitable uh and we'll we will do planes trains and automobiles across the north we will take every known means of conveyance to get from one end of the high arctic through to the other and they said that's a great idea it's too expensive we can't go so in i think it was in november uh sinclair stewart who's the managing editor very brilliant guy you know a classic news editor type you know sort of deeply autistic you know you know it speaks in a kind of he said that in telegraph style you know you you i keep every time i see him i remember that great thing that robert benchley you know that he was he was supposed to be writing a news story for uh for about venice and he got you know he we got to venice eventually we'd like to live he had dinner you know he had a couple of drinks took a couple of days off before he started writing he sent a telegram to the editor of the new yorker that said arrive venice street's full of water please advise i thought that was every time i see sinclair stewart i think of him i think of that because he's sort of like that but the anyway he said to me at one point would you like to go to the arctic and for a month with a photographer and write a piece and i said how long he said oh you know four or five thousand words something like that but but you can go for a month i said well how are you gonna send me because you know the globe is losing money right um it's a terrible situation and i said how are you gonna send me and he said well we've got the prophets off we did a kind of uh one of these sponsored things right you know like a branded content piece for a bunch and we we insisted in sales that we get part of the profit so that we can finance some arctic journalism because it's so expensive and i said well where do you want me to go he said you can go every wherever you want all i want is for you to get frostbite i want you to i won't no you didn't say frostbite why don't you get slow snow blindness because i want you to really feel i want i want i want a sense of the there of the place if there is a there of the place he started talking about moby dick and whiteness and all this kind of thing but you know he's a good editor right and if he says you know he'll go but what i couldn't figure out was where the money came from because 50 grand for flight that never happens so i knew something had to be up and i said is it branded content is it custom content is it native content is it whatever the hell they call it there's 75 different names for it it's like newspeak you know uh in orwell but he finally said no no no it's actual free car it's profit it's dedicated to this and you can go and do that and i said and i get to write what i want there's no and he said absolutely so we went i don't know we had 20 50 12 15 the stack of stuff i had the notebooks a loner like that and you know it's unbelievable you know for five weeks in the arctic in november it's the most inhospitable place i've it's even more inexhabitable than golden you know it's unbelievable place just cold and haiti and the you know the people hate it right i mean you're a white journalist and you go to an inuit guy you say i i want i'd like to talk to you and he just looks at you like you know you are an insect get away from me it's unbelievable and you can't go anywhere you sit on a it's you you find you know you're walking and you're so cold you think skadoo great fantastic skadoo i could actually get on this i'll get that in five minutes you get on the skidoo your ass is so cold you go 50 miles an hour you're frozen in this position for about an hour you know you can't do anything but all that stuff sort of adds up and becomes very very interesting on top of all this you know there's so many issues and everything is so stark that everything has bearing everything has has gravity you know it has there's something at stake if it's somebody walking down the street you know with his hat off there's something at stake and so it becomes it's great but um but many people have come up to me at the globe and said that was a sponsored piece i i they you know sinclair stewart is not a liar and he's i think there might be some i don't i actually don't know how the north thing happened i think there was an advertiser maybe it was one of those situations where i would love to have some stuff on the north period i don't want to i don't care anything beyond that i want you know i'd love it to be good but i'm not sure because there is it is odd how money percolates up there sometimes if you think i thought we had no money and then money comes and i'm not saying and i'm saying in very honor completely honorable ways there is still budgets for funny things if they decide it's important so it might have just simply been that and other people assumed it must be sponsored well the editor the new editor claims that it uh it can't you know that they asked for a piece on the north but the but the editor commissioned this said they did not that he went to them and said i've got a piece in the north you're ge you sell giant generators you want to do a lot of business in the north would you like to slap your name on this and it's our content and they did and now they rerun it they have this thing called evergreen content and they you know and now it's you know like the max corner store is advertising on the arctic piece i mean god forbid if they should go up there and try and sell things can you imagine going to the video i'm going to i mean [Laughter] he's just started i would invite all of you to follow all three of our guests to master especially him to continue the storytelling over a drink i would like to thank our guests this evening charlotte gill victor dwyer and of course ian brown give them a round of applause you

Channel: Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity

Views: 337,786

Rating: 4.6372418 out of 5

Keywords: The Banff Centre, Banff Centre (Venue), Banff (City/Town/Village), Banff National Park, Literary Journalism, Literary Arts, Ian Brown, Victor Dwyer, Charlotte Gill, Editing (Industry), editor, Writing (Interest), Journalist (Profession), media, The Globe And Mail (Newspaper)

Id: bP_SmnCQA_Y

Length: 37min 14sec (2234 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 25 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/drsombrerophd]

I made it three minutes in then I made the decision that I don't want to be a writer anymore.

[u/[deleted]]

I like how the lady there spouts metaphysics then the guy talks about clarity.

If I was in the business of hiring editors I would pick the guy out of these two because there is a formula to writing more or less and metaphysics doesn't exactly cut it for me when finding great books.

That being said I agree with him about the 8 lines thing too. That is super cut-throat. If I was judging every book by the first 8 lines half of them wouldn't make the cut. And, Judging by the looks of the trade publishing industry I doubt that 8 lines thing is literal in any sense of the word for the industry at large. What I mean by that is the editor was probably boasting or exaggerating their standards.

Those are my thoughts.