Jack’s Wednesday guest blog is late again – –

Wendy and I watched a movie last week that brought back a lot of memories. The film was called ‘Genius’ and starred Colin Firth and Jude Law.

The movie opens with a view of the Scribners building in New York and that brought back the first memory. When we owned a bookstore in Big Stone Gap we always had to have some first editions of ‘The Trail of the Lonesome Pine’ (published by Scribners). My job was to find good first editions cheap so we always had them in stock.

The film then moves to a nondescript guy coming into one of Scribners’ editor’s offices holding a handwritten manuscript. This turns out to be Thomas Wolfe! I knew the name but not much more. The movie then continues to cover their work and personal relationships.

When Wendy’s book ‘The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap’ was accepted by St Martins she was allocated an editor (the lovely Nichole) and we made a number of journeys to the ‘flat iron’ building in New York. So I was able to observe the relationship between an editor and author close up, and that was fascinating. Of course technology has moved on since the days of Thomas Wolfe, so instead of a handwritten pile of pages it all went back and forward over the internet. Also, there were many others involved – not just proof readers, but legal experts, folk checking references and even the designer of the cover!

And yet, the conversation was very much the same: it is YOUR book; I am here to help you make it as strong as possible. Cut this. Yes, I mean it. Of course I want to hear why you don’t want to cut it. Yes, okay, we’re still going to cut it.

When Wendy laughed at some point in the dialogue between editor and writer, I asked her why. She said, “this is an old dance. The editor is paid to have opinions; that’s what Nichole always said. And then they have to second guess themselves all the way, while the writer wants to do the right thing but doesn’t want to admit they might not have done it right in the first place. In the end, all you can do is what you did and launch the thing and let it go.”

Fair enough…..