The Art of Making Magazines

On Being an Editor and Other Views from the Industry

Victor Navasky, Evan Cornog

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780231504690
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In this entertaining anthology, editors, writers, art directors, and publishers from such magazines as Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Elle, and Harper's draw on their varied, colorful experiences to explore a range of issues concerning their profession. Combining anecdotes with expert analysis, these leading industry insiders speak on writing and editing articles, developing great talent, effectively incorporating art and design, and the critical relationship between advertising dollars and content. They emphasize the importance of fact checking and copyediting; share insight into managing the interests (and potential conflicts) of various departments; explain how to parlay an entry-level position into a masthead title; and weigh the increasing influence of business interests on editorial decisions. In addition to providing a rare, behind-the-scenes look at the making of successful and influential magazines, these contributors address the future of magazines in a digital environment and the ongoing importance of magazine journalism. Full of intimate reflections and surprising revelations, The Art of Making Magazines is both a how-to and a how-to-be guide for editors, journalists, students, and anyone hoping for a rare peek between the lines of their favorite magazines. The chapters are based on talks delivered as part of the George Delacorte Lecture Series at the Columbia School of Journalism.

Essays include: "Talking About Writing for Magazines (Which One Shouldn't Do)" by John Gregory Dunne; "Magazine Editing Then and Now" by Ruth Reichl; "How to Become the Editor in Chief of Your Favorite Women's Magazine" by Roberta Myers; "Editing a Thought-Leader Magazine" by Michael Kelly; "Fact-Checking at The New Yorker" by Peter Canby; "A Magazine Needs Copyeditors Because...." by Barbara Walraff; "How to Talk to the Art Director" by Chris Dixon; "Three Weddings and a Funeral" by Tina Brown; "The Simpler the Idea, the Better" by Peter W. Kaplan; "The Publisher's Role: Crusading Defender of the First Amendment or Advertising Salesman?" by John R. MacArthur; "Editing Books Versus Editing Magazines" by Robert Gottlieb; and "The Reader Is King" by Felix Dennis

1

Talking About Writing for Magazines (Which One Shouldn’t Do)

John Gregory Dunne was a novelist, essayist, screenwriter (with his wife, Joan Didion), and critic. His books include True Confessions, Dutch Shea, Jr., and Playland, and he was a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books. He died in December 2003.

In general, it is bad business for a writer to talk about writing. William Faulkner once said that a writer’s obituary should read, “He wrote the books, then he died.”

Allowing for the Faulkner caveat, let me state a few basic precepts. I am a writer. I am a professional writer. I write to make a living. That is what I do. I do it the same way some people make their living as lawyers or teachers or executives or engineers or investment analysts or doctors or contractors or entrepreneurs or bureaucrats, or even as remittance men. Writing is my job. It is the only job I have. I don’t teach on the side, I rarely lecture—and when I do, it’s usually free, like this one.

I have been asked this evening if I would talk about a writer’s voice. All of you here tonight are enterprising young journalists and you believe in facts and who, what, where, when, and how, and everything will open up and lay itself out.

If it’s not Enron.

The fact of the matter is that as you get older, you will discover that the singer is more important than the song. If you do magazine journalism, “why” ultimately matters as much as or even more than “who,” “what,” “where,” “when,” and “how.” And not so much “why” as a meditation on “why.” Or a contemplation on “how” or “who.”

When I say the singer is more important than the song, I don’t mean in the sense of ego. I mean you bring more to the story. You bring an attitude. You bring a professional and personal DNA. You are smarter. You know more. You have more filed away in your memory drum that you think you have forgotten. You have the odd fact stashed away, you didn’t even know it was there, it’s the fact that demolishes received wisdom.

An example:

A couple of years ago, in 1999 or 2000, I wrote a piece for The New Yorker called “Virtual Patriotism.” It was about the surfeit of patriotism that supposedly took over the land when Saving Private Ryan was released, as if you can find patriotism at the Cineplex, in your five-dollar bucket of butter-flavored popcorn and three-dollar box of Milk Duds.

There was all this “greatest generation” bullshit: those guys were tough, we’re soft, we’re the Seinfeld generation. I thought the op-ed page posturing had the air of generational flagellation lite. There was also a lot of specious nonsense about the Vietnam generation: those guys wouldn’t fight for their country, we would be proud to.

It’s not unlike what we hear today, the confusion of patriotism with cheerleading. But that’s another subject.

Anyway, I remembered something, and this is what I wrote:

The strength of this delusion is such that it survived even the Gulf War. In February 1991, David Maraniss of The Washington Post interviewed seven male Vanderbilt University undergraduates about Operation Desert Storm. All were twenty or twenty-one years old, roughly the same age as the troops poised to liberate Kuwait and invade Iraq. Five of the seven supported the war, none was willing to fight in it, and all were opposed to military conscription. “This might sound selfish, but I think it would be a shame to put America’s best young minds on the front line,” said one, and another, “I don’t see myself shooting a gun … I don’t feel I could be an effective soldier.”

On the op-ed page of the Los Angeles Times, a Princeton senior was even more unequivocal in his espousal of student entitlement, and his acceptance of the idea that America now had a Hessian class that would fight this and future wars, an army of the socially and economically disenfranchised drawn from the skid rows of the American dream. “Is it hypocritical of me to support the Persian Gulf War in which some of my peers are dying, but not be willing to put my life on the line?” he wrote. “I don’t think so.… No one is arguing that our volunteer troops are expendable. But we should be willing to risk their lives even when our immediate security is not on the line. After all, they agreed to be used that way.”

“What the Gulf War”—and this is still from my New Yorker piece—“showed was that ‘support,’ or enthusiasm, for war now rises in inverse proportion to the inclination to fight it.”

Here is the point I am trying to make. I wrote this piece, as I said, in 1999; David Maraniss did his piece in The Washington Post in 1991. Eight years earlier. But I remembered it. I also remembered that Princeton asshole (in part because I went to Princeton). That’s what I mean when I say you are smarter. When I stashed this stuff either in my mind or on a computer or in a file box, I had no idea I was one day going to find a place for it. But it was there and allowed me to question this dreamy idea of patriotism.

One more example, from a piece my wife wrote for The New York Review of Books about the Central Park jogger.

You all remember the jogger story. It was 1989, and this young woman, a thirty-year-old broker in a big downtown firm, was jogging in the park after dark, and she was attacked, raped, and nearly killed—brained with a brick, her brain tissue exposed by a group of young blacks from Harlem who brought the word “wilding” into the language.

It was a ghastly story. But what interested Joan was the way that all stories in New York had to have a sentimental narrative, that the city was a cesspool of sentimentality, that even the tragic and the horrific, as this story was, had to be turned into a morality tale, a parable: courage and class, indomitable dignity.

Here is a paragraph from that piece:

The narrative comforts us, in other words, with the assurance that the world is knowable, even flat, and New York its center, its motor, its dangerous but vital “energy.” “Family in Fatal Mugging Loved New York” was the Times headline on a story following the September murder, in the 53rd Street IND station, of a twenty-two-year-old tourist from Utah. The young man, his parents, his brother and his sister-in-law had attended the U.S. Open and were reportedly on their way to dinner at Tavern on the Green. “New York, to them, was the greatest place in the world,” a family friend from Utah was quoted as having said. Since the narrative requires that the rest of the country provide a dramatic contrast to New York, the family’s hometown in Utah was characterized by the Times as a place where “life revolves around the orderly rhythms of Brigham Young University” and “there is only about one murder a year.” The town was in fact Provo, a mean frontier town where the Central Pacific met the Union Pacific and Gary Gilmore shot the motel manager, both in life and in Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song.

She remembered Provo, was able to retrieve it from her memory drum in order to expose the sentimentality behind the “Family in Fatal Mugging” headline and the equally sentimental celebration of Provo’s neighborly values perfection in the Times story, because twelve years earlier she had read The Executioner’s Song and reviewed it for the New York Times Book Review.

These two examples are what I mean when I say that with age and experience you bring a professional DNA to a story.

Let’s get to the personal DNA.

I’d like to quote here from the English novelist, the late Paul Scott. He wrote The Raj Quartet, in my mind the best book—a tetrology, actually—to come out of World War II. This is what he wrote in a book called On Writing:

I am someone born in my age, subject to its pressures, prejudices and expectations, scorched by its past, living in its present.

I don’t think anyone has ever explained better what makes a writer. Not just a writer of fiction, but any writer. And explained where the writer’s voice comes from. Let me repeat it: “Born in my age, subject to its pressures, prejudices and expectations, scorched by its past.” “The duty of the writer”—this is Paul Scott again—“is to expose to public view his private view of what reality is.” Because everything the writer writes is only an extended metaphor of his view of life.

You bring to this extended metaphor a childlike curiosity. For example, I am interested in how things work, in how a deal is made, a conglomerate formed. How a tooth is reconstructed or an aorta patched. How Mariano Rivera throws a hard slider, how the air currents and the speed of the projectile and the angle of the wrist at the point of release conspire to make a pitch that one man was not intended to throw, and that another man cannot hit.

I guess that what I am trying to say is that being a writer is a license to be curious.

Beyond that, “the hours are good,” as Ernest Hemingway once said. And as John McNulty added, “There’s no heavy lifting.”

A personal note here, my own DNA, as it were. I don’t think I would have become a writer if I hadn’t stuttered (or stammered) as a child. A stutterer is by definition an outsider. A stutterer is not a CEO. Or an adviser on decedent trusts or fiduciary management. A stutterer cannot be a brain surgeon if it takes him eight or ten seconds to ask for a clamp.

I still stutter, although I can usually disguise it so well that—unless I am drunk or tired or nervous—the stammer is almost imperceptible.

Like all stutterers, I have my own distant early warning system. I can recognize two or three sentences ahead those hard consonants that will trigger the booby traps, and I have a warehouse of soft and sibilant synonyms that will carry me across the minefields of speech.

As you have noticed, the effect of this personal early warning line is to give my diction an odd, herky-jerky cadence, making me sound like nothing so much as a simultaneous translation from another language into English.

And so, because of this stammer, I considered myself one of those who ends up as an outcast, an adventurer, a malcontent, a ne’er-do-well.

In compensation, I learned to express myself on paper. I listened to the way people talked, becoming in the process a rather good mimic, and grew so precociously observant that my dear late mother once complained that I never missed a twitch or a wonky eyelid or a crooked seam on a stocking.

When I was a young writer, I thought this facility a virtue, but as I grow older I am less sure. Put a writer with a tendency toward misanthropy in front of a typewriter and the possibility—the probability—exists that someone, usually someone unsuspecting, is going to get mugged.

I recognize an occasional absence of charity in myself—the writer as malcontent, remember—and for this reason I started to put myself into my work. Perhaps if I exposed my own mosaic of petty treasons, the people I was writing about would have less reason to complain.

You see, no matter what the writer is writing about, no matter where his curiosity takes him, the writer is always essentially investigating himself. He is always trying to reprogram the responses to his own past.

I can tell you who this writer is. I was a stammerer, which already in my own mind made me an outcast. I was also Irish and a Catholic, and in a real sense, in the New England city where I grew up, that made me a social outcast. This was in the years before Jack Kennedy was elected president. It will be difficult for many of you to believe now how his election in 1960 was a kind of absolution, in certain parts of New England, for having been born Irish and Catholic.

We did not know Protestants. We did not know Jews. Not to mention blacks. When my wife and I were married, my mother had a reception for us in Hartford, my hometown. There were 125 people there. One hundred and twenty-four were Irish Catholics. The 125th was my wife, who was Episcopalian—and worse, a Californian.

My grandfather was an immigrant from County Roscommon, twelve years old when he washed up in Hartford in 1869, with a card around his neck to identify him to relatives from an earlier generation of refugees. His education ended in the fifth grade. From 1874 until his death in 1940, he was a grocer in Frog Hollow, a section of Hartford that the poor Irish who lived there would be too proud to call a ghetto, its proper description.

Frog Hollow abutted Park Street, and was a community of male Irish laborers and female Irish domestics who worked farther west in the households of people I still call, with a special distaste not allayed by my years, Yanks; “WASP” belongs to the sanitized diction of pop anthropology. For the Irish in Frog Hollow, upward mobility was available only via what I once called “the three Ps—politics, the priesthood, and the police department.”

I grew up in West Hartford, the ne plus ultra of the Hartford Irish immigrant dream, steerage to suburbia in three generations. My grandfather had prospered, and my parents’ house on Albany Avenue had a six-car garage. Ours was a world of Havilland china and private schools and a retinue of help—I am still not assimilated enough to use the word “servants.”

I became a cloned Yank. My father graduated from Catholic University and Harvard Medical School—guess where he said he was educated—and I had a Princeton degree and a jaded sophistication much valued at Hartford debutante parties.

A Hartford debutante—that seems to me the definition of an oxymoron.

I not only wanted to be assimilated, I was ashamed of being Irish.

Blessedly, the cultural transplant did not take place. The gutter Irish spleen rejected the faux Yank cells. I was, I remain, ineffably Frog Hollow. Today I remember the nuns who taught me at St. Joseph School—Sister Barnabas, Sister Theodosius, Sister Marie de Nice—more clearly than I remember the professors in the history department at Princeton.

The Sisters of Mercy who ran St. Joseph were like steelworkers. If they had been born men, they would have had tattoos of the Sacred Heart on their biceps and worn T-shirts with a deck of smokes rolled up in the sleeve. Sister Robert was the ringleader. She had a red face and rimless glasses and an 18-inch ruler that she swung as if she were a Crusader, and the kids in her homeroom were a bunch of infidels.

The line on Sister Robert was that she would hit you until you bled, and then she would hit you for bleeding. If that didn’t work, there was always Father Hannon, the principal, who was a mean man with a rubber hose. This led to a rather sullen bunch of malcontents in the school yard, where your status was based on the number of times Father Hannon bent you over the refectory table in his office, made you lower your knickers, and whacked you on your bare ass with his rubber hose. We had not heard of the word “pedophilia” in those days.

The true Irish voice of my generation is the voice of a man with a chip on his shoulder the size of a California redwood. Let me emphasize that a voice does not have to be nice, and if the voice belongs to someone of Irish extraction, it rarely is. I think this comes from an inbred hatred of the Brits, and by extension a distaste for all Protestants.

The Irish voice is essentially one that gets a boot out of frailty and misfortune; its comedy is the comedy of the small mind and the mean spirit. Nothing lifts the heart of the Irish caroler more than the small vice, the tiny lapse, the exposed vanity, the recherché taste.

Although it is not necessary for the writer to be a prick, neither does it hurt. The writer is an eternal outsider, his nose pressed against whatever window on the other side of which he sees his material. Resentment sharpens his eye, hostility hones his killer instinct. And I guess what I am also trying to say is that while a writer’s past is always there, it has to be mined, dug out, held up against the light. It does not extrude naturally from the subconscious onto the page. It’s easy to look back now and say it followed from A to zed, but don’t forget, I was also trying to be a Yank during a lot of this time, from Princeton, ’54 to the Stanford University School of Business.

I actually was accepted at Stanford Business School. I had applied to keep my mother off my back; she was one of the many to see I had no negotiable skills, and maybe two years at business school would shape me up. I so hated the idea of Stanford Business School that I volunteered for the army. I ask you to consider me as a draftee—a middle-class Irish Catholic with a stutter, an undistinguished history degree from Princeton, the politics of an alderman, and social graces polished to a high gloss at the Hartford Gold Club. What I wanted most in life was to be an Episcopalian. What I became was a PFC in a gun battery in Germany.

As educations go, Baker Battery was as good as any I had received at boarding school or at Princeton. The battery commander was a drunk, the first sergeant had syphilis, and the medic was what we used to call in those days “queer.” I shared a room in the barracks with the medic and his twin, a cannoneer in the gun section whose elevator did not go all the way to the top floor. In the room next door there were a couple of brothers from Tennessee. Their last name was Jethro. Neither had a first name. The older brother was W. X. Jethro, the younger Y. Z. Jethro. The army to me was like a Rhodes scholarship.

In retrospect, I have made a living off the army for the past forty years. It was my passport out of the stalag of the middle class into the terra incognita of the culturally and economically stateless. The army helped define a voice, the same way that parochial school did, the way that insane desire to be assimilated did, and as did the tension between the gutter Irish parochial schoolboy and the cloned Yank in white tie and tails at the Hartford debutante parties.

The voice defined an attitude, an attitude toward life and toward material. Let me say something here that will come as somewhat surprising to those of you who are not writers. Writers are always being approached by people who say, “I’ve got this terrific story to tell, if only I had the time to tell it.…”

In a word, bullshit. There are no good stories. There is only an attitude toward the story. And that attitude is defined by all those things I mentioned earlier—the wound stripes of life.

Let me give you Henry James. Here he is on t...