Roger Angell wrote wonderful books about baseball and was an essayist and editor at The New Yorker. His father in law was E.B. White, author of Charlotte’s Web.
I recently finished his book Let Me Finish where he wrote this, “The only piece of advice I ever got from William Shawn was something he said to me in 1956, in my very first week as an editor at the magazine. ‘It’s no great trick,’ he said, ‘to edit a piece of fiction and turn it into the greatest story ever written. Anyone can do that. It’s much harder to take a story and help that writer turn it into the best thing he is capable of this week or this month.’ What you hope for is that the writer will sense how this process works, and will learn to trust it.”
I love Angell’s insight how the role of an editor is to help a writer understand the process of how to take the next step forward in her or his development, and not demonstrate the final result. An insight to be applied to any of these roles we might be fortunate to hold: supervisor, teacher, coach, parent, grandparent, etc.
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