Tina Brown on writing and editing: The Vanity Fair Diaries 1983-1992

As I wrote in a previous post, I read Tina Brown’s Vanity Fair Diaries with some fascination and yet a sense of repellence. Two areas in particular gripped me: the first, her take on editing and what makes good writing, and the second, her thoughts as a Brit living in America on finding home (which I wrote about here). My thoughts are in italic, interspersed with extracts from her book. As I read an advance copy in ebook format, I don’t have page numbers to share.

One part of the diaries that I didn’t enjoy was the name-dropping, but mainly I wondered about the diaries’ veracity. Not that she was lying, but how she wrote them. For instance, how did she fit in the writing of these diaries into her Very Important Life? I felt like she was keeping the diaries for future publication, crafting her experiences even as she was living them with the rearview mirror in her sightline so as to shape the final product into something saleable. As she says below, her retirement pension.

Ed Victor walked into my office in a burst of good cheer and told me that at the ABA the editor in chief of Crown had told him he would pay in the region of 250K for a novel by me! The catch is, I have no time to write it. Ed said, “I hope you’re still keeping a diary. I see it as my retirement pension.” Wish I did have time to write a book. I’ve always thought my “outer life” was research for the day when I’d just withdraw and write about it. The only reason I go out is observation greed. Churning through the cast of New York society, I see it as the ever-moving slipstream of a novel. At Billy and Jane Hitchcock’s dinner in Gracie Square the careless beauty of the rich was never clearer. Amanda Burden’s slim, fragile shoulders in a red chiffon spaghetti-strapped dress and biscuit-colored legs. Bill Hitchcock’s big jaw and opinionated mustache…

At times she’d throw in a line like the one below that would jar me, waking me up out of my stance as a reader as I’d feel it lacked authenticity. I wrote a note in the margin: “So cheesy.”

I want our child to be conceived here, I want this to be our special place where I can be with Harry always.

As one with a long background in publishing, I appreciated her thoughts on writing and its business. Such as:

Deadlines are a great antidote to insecurity.

I suggested what I always do to encourage first-timers: Just write as if in a letter to me, pour it out and we’ll help knit it together; not to worry about structure.

How does one become a writer? You can learn the tricks of the trade, but you have to have an innate quality, I think, of being aware and curious:

He seems to me such a natural writer. You can teach people structure and how to write a lead. But you can’t teach them how to notice the right things.

And as she says, many editors and writers are introverts, but need boot-to-bum to get out of the chair and go experience and observe life:

Ed Epstein told me that when Clay Felker was editing he would walk by each desk at lunchtime and say, “Why aren’t you out?” It’s essential if you are an editor to do so, and being an introvert by nature, I remind myself of this each time.

She describes one of the hardest decisions I faced as a commissioning editor:

The real agony of editing is not the bad piece versus the good piece. That’s easy-kill one and publish the other. It’s the borderline piece that is the source of woe. The piece that’s perfectly good, inoffensively unexceptional, just okay, usually written by someone who’s an almost friend or an iconic name or a writer who just didn’t give their best this time but might well in the future. I have no fear of rejecting the bad and prefer to do it fast. But borderline pieces bring out the worst in me. Out of weakness I sometimes first assent, then think better of it, then am tormented by something I truly want to put in its place, then, as more of the really good surges in, ultimately eject it, making an enemy forever and wishing I’d had the discipline to just let it hide there among the good stuff as an investment in the future.

What makes a good editor? I agree with her thoughts below, which is why I found that meeting a potential author in person and spending time with them, say, over lunch, was so very important and necessary. I loved collaborating with authors, helping them uncover buried passions or give voice to what they wanted to say.

An editor’s job is to make people say yes to something they hadn’t thought they could do. I love getting to know writers and listening to what turns them on, which is often the direct opposite of what we had originally started to talk about. So often what they are actually known for doing doesn’t reflect what they should be doing.

And I agree with the sheer joy of editing, of making prose sing, of reducing the unnecessary words:

I’ve always loved the routine aspects of editing, the poised pencil, the swift identification of the lines that have to go, the insert that will make it sing, the rewarding moment when you see that the whole thing should start on page nine and flip the penultimate paragraph to the top of the piece, and all you want to do is call the writer immediately and tell him or her why.

Yes – writers need editors:

Surely what The New Yorker needs to be is not just a “writer’s magazine” but a reader’s magazine, because writers, unless guided and edited and lured out of their comfort zones, can go off-piste into dreary cul-de-sacs of introversion and excess and entirely forget about questions of content and pace.

But editors are often undervalued:

Writing brilliant sentences (and editing them) does not have the market value of writing brilliant code, even though, as we learn every day, critical thinking is the DNA of democracy.

If you’d like to read some of my other posts on writing, you can find them in my FAQs page, toward the bottom.

What strikes you from Tina Brown’s memoirs, on the topic of writing and editing?