REVIEW: THINKING LIKE YOUR EDITOR
Susan Rabiner and Alfred Fortunato. Thinking Like Your Editor: How To Write Great Serious Nonfiction -- and Get It Published. W.W. Norton, 2002. Reviewed by Marylaine Block
How much do any of us know about what goes into the making of a book? How do the chain stores influence which manuscripts are chosen and how they're marketed? What does a book proposal have to have to win attention from an agent? What's the difference between the proposed table of contents and sample chapters, and the ones that are ultimately published, and why? What's the usual time between acceptance of a manuscript and publication? How can the author influence the way the book is marketed? Books may be the primary stock in trade for librarians, but I'm willing to bet most of us couldn't answer any of these questions.
Susan Rabiner, a literary agent who was once an editor in a major publishing house, knows the business from two separate angles: she understands the needs of the publishers for marketable books, and the needs of aspiring authors with good ideas for the guidance that will make their raw material publishable. She tells writers how to put together a submission package, find the right agent, maintain good relations with agents and publishers, and other useful tricks of the trade.
Naturally the book will appeal to nonfiction writers and scholars who have visions of turning their dissertations into best-sellers. The other people who will appreciate this book, though, are teachers of writing and rhetoric.
That's because a good part of the book is devoted to the need for good, fair argument. Why argument? Because without a thesis that shapes the selection of data, and a persuasive arrangement and interpretation of the data, the author is doing little more than spewing forth quantities of ill-digested data -- look, Ma, I did my research!
But if the purpose is to persuade, why then does the author have to give a fair presentation of differing interpretations of the data? Because without that fairness, the author loses credibility. Informed readers are left with the choice of assuming that the authors didn't do their homework, and somehow missed key works in the field, or that they desperately hoped their readers wouldn't have read those works and would accept their versions of what those works said. Authors who are too insistent on their theses without doing justice to opposing views risk sounding like talk show pundits who win by shouting louder and not stopping to take a breath.
Rabiner also talks about using narrative structure and techniques to develop the argument, because "the first job of any book is to get itself read. Unless you dismiss the value of having a readership, I know no better way to lure and hold a reader than to tell a story." It tells us there is more to come, missing pieces of the puzzle to be filled in. It helps us understand complicated and even abstract ideas, because we are a species that understands our world through stories.
Any student would benefit from these writing skills. Any teacher would be grateful to read papers that were argued well amd fairly.
Rabiner walks writers through the writing process, explains how to use narrative techniques, and what to do when you've written yourself into a hole you don't know how to climb out of. She explains what the publisher will do with the manuscript once it's been delivered, and what authors can do to make it easier for publishers to market their work.
Once you have read this, you will never look at any book in quite the same way again . When you see a book like The Romance of the Fungus World, that makes you wonder what in God's name the publisher was smoking, you will know the kind of hope and effort that went into even that books' production. Or, conversely, you may begin to see some advantage in the fact that publishing is no longer a leisurely gentleman's pursuit but a business driven by people who hope to turn a profit.
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COOL QUOTE
[from a column suggesting that a public library be built on the World Trade Center site]
We say that our way of life was attacked on September 11. What we mean is that our words were attacked - our sauntering, freewheeling, raucus, stumbling, unbridled, unregulated, unorthodox words. All that we are in this country came out of words -- 18th century words, 19th century words -- which in turn wend their way back into a past that existed long before the first sentence of the Book of John. Every word is a new idea, and there is nothing like a new idea to counteract the stony madness of fanatics. If a man spends enough time in a library, he may actually change his mind. I have seen it happen.
When the Sterling Library was going up at Yale in the 1930s, there was a big to-do over the building because it was one of the more impressive modern edifices of its kind in the world. Some wag who had his values straight proposed posting a sign outside the entrance when the building opened that read: "This is not the library. The library is inside." The library is always inside. It may be the only monument we have to the things that can enlighten and advance us, and thus assuage at least some of the sorrow for which there are no words.
Roger Rosenblatt. "Ground Zero: Build a Monument of Words." Time, May 25, 2002. http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/
0,8599,249998,00.html
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