Helen Gurley Brown was certainly an Equal Opportunity Employer. While most of the staff at Cosmo were indeed female –of course – she not only carried me on the masthead as Contributing Editor. Her Managing Editor was George Walsh, a very talented, quiet, self-effacing kind of fellow, but second in hierarchy only to her. After leaving Cosmo, George went on to become Editor in Chief at Ballentine Books (the mass market division of Random House), graduating from there to become Editor in Chief at the general book division of the enormous Macmillan Publishing Co. In his era, one of the ten or fifteen most important people in American publishing, right? Well, George and I have stayed in touch. Telling him about this class, I recently asked him this: “George, put yourself back into your Ed-in-Chief chair. When an agent submitted a manuscript by a new writer, what was the first thing you looked for?” Here’s his reply. “Like any editor I read a script hoping to be grabbed by the first few graphs and pages…the journalism schools teach who what where why and how, and these facts can be stated baldly in a straightforward news story...but the writers art in magazine articles and fiction lies in getting them across more subtly--through irony, contrast, shock, whatever. Often this is easier said than done...” * Let’s see what George means. What indeed do New York agents, editors and publishers look for in new writers? Let’s say I sing Bruce Springsteen’s, “Born in the U.S.A.” Then he sings it. We’re both telling the same “story.” But what a difference. This is the most important lesson I know in the art of writing: it ain’t what you do; it’s the way that you do it. Which brings us to: Virginia Woolf once remarked that she found the urge to write, “like being hitched to a shark.” Sound like you? Let me introduce myself. Maybe I can help. Former New York Daily News columnist, Contributing Editor for Helen Gurley Brown at Cosmo, author of six books published by major New York houses -- one a Book-of-the-Month – I’ve written “Writing to Get Published,” a digital textbook I give my online classes. If you’d like to see Lesson One, it’s free—just ask: billmanville@gmail
Posted on: Tue, 06 Jan 2015 17:14:56 +0000
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