Wednesday's Writing on Writing

DON'T MISS THE INVITATION BELOW

Forty years ago, when I started looking for work in Christian publishing, my newspaper sports writing colleagues thought I was nuts. They knew I was a Christian, but they couldn't imagine that writing and publishing in the religious arena would be anything but dead boring.

I soon landed a job as editor of a high school Sunday school paper for Scripture Press Publications and began there late in 1971. The weekly publication, FreeWay, which was produced in thirteen-issue quarterly packets, focused on first-person as-told-to stories. I bought or assigned many of these stories, but I had to write more than half of them. That meant traveling all over the country, interviewing, and writing people stories in the voices of my subjects. It was like journalism boot camp, and I had the time of my life.

As editor of the little paper, I also had to quickly learn all the technical aspects of publishing. I wrote the headlines and captions, did the layout, worked with the artists and photographers, even decided where page numbers went.

My boss there was Stanley C. Baldwin, a quiet, unassuming, interesting character who was also a local pastor. He not only edited everything I wrote, but he second-edited everything I edited. Every single day I resolved to present to Stan a piece of writing or editing he couldn't improve. And every day the work returned to my inbox bearing his marks showing the things I had missed.

His eagle eye made me work harder and harder, and while I never got to the point where he couldn't change a thing (a good lesson—we all always need another pair of eyes on our work), over the course of two years I saw fewer and fewer adjustments coming back.

Working under Stan was the best schooling I ever got. I became a ferocious self-editor, and I still work to polish my writing with each pass. My goal is to submit the cleanest manuscripts I can. To this day the most gratifying thing I can hear from a publisher is "Our editors barely needed to touch it."

Writers Digest University Webinars ([email protected]) invites you to attend my Webinar tomorrow:

"Become a Ferocious Self-Editor" presented by Jerry B. Jenkins

Thursday, August 25, 2011 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM EDT