Comments Juno Editor/Paula Guran on 31 Mar 2009 01:07 pm
So what DO editors do, anyway?
Ever hear of that line from Burton Rascoe…? “What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he’s staring out of the window.” (The man was born in 1892, so don’t leap on the sexism.) Makes sense. Writing is creative process. A writer has to think…
Editors don’t look out windows. They fall into computer screens and get lost.
Yesterday I had my head totally into a first edit on a manuscript. For me, when I’m in that groove, I go into sort of a time trance or something. My head is completely into what I’m doing. I looked at the time in the upper right-hand corner of the trusty iMac: 6:08 PM. Thought to myself that I’d knock off about 6:30 for a break. Next time my eyes tracked the inch or so from Word to the time…it was 7:47 pm.
Whoa. I was expecting it to be maybe 6:30.
And I hadn’t progressed all that much. Nothing dire with the book I was working on, just considering this and that and if this was clear and it that was correct and, hey, did she mention such-and-such before? and…
Plus it must have been nap time for my staff interns, aka, the cats, none of whom had invaded the office during the period.
Or maybe the aliens had taken me, wiped my mind of the incident, and returned me to my chair…
on 01 Apr 2009 at 3:13 pm 1.Tracy Sharp said …
Haha! I love that quote!
I sometimes get fall into the screen
on 08 Apr 2009 at 1:58 pm 2.Shalanna Collins said …
That’s called the “flowstate,” or going into The Zone. When I was taking my teaching certificate and working on my Master’s degree, I had two courses that explored teaching math and abstract thinking using chess. Chess tends to put people into a “flowstate,” as do video games (and now you know why the boys love those games!) In the flowstate, time ceases to tick off as regards the Real World as we concentrate on channeling the Muse or on analysis of a problem. The books _Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience_ and _Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention_, both by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (and you thought “Shalanna” was a challenge), tell you a lot about the experience and how to encourage slipping into it.