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I enjoyed the work and everyone I was lucky enough to meet, and as for the strategic wisdom of contributing to industry trends that increasingly demand that writers write for free — that’s another conversation for another day. What has stuck with me post-gig is this: the project leads were primarily interested in the timing of posts and the content type (video, recipe, Top Ten list, etc.).

How well the content was crafted? They didn’t think it mattered much. Talking about “content” became permission not to think about content or its creators, only format and mode of delivery. Their reader, I was told, is not looking for The New Yorker-caliber stuff, so don’t fuss with sentences or the look and feel of the material because it’s wasted effort. Don’t bother with all that hand-holding, either.

I briefly argued that no, I wasn’t trying to serve up The New Yorker to people who preferred People. I just wanted our People-ish fare to be the best People-ish fare it could be, and if we aspired to build something that would last and get traction in the marketplace, then we needed to make sure those individuals writing for us for free were very, very, very happy with their experience with us, and that meant semi-regular contact with a living, breathing editor who cared for them personally and even had occasional ideas on how they could develop their thoughts or careers.

I lost those arguments, the client and I parted amicably and have been friendly since, and I still think those subtleties matter. In online publishing you need people who worry about SEO, links, Facebook integration, and so on. At great risk of sounding woo-woo mystical, however, I don’t think any publication has a chance of succeeding — measured by attention and ultimately page views — if a reader can’t sense that someone at the helm truly loves it. Yes, love. It’s subtle. But it shows. A reader might not readily wrap words around what they’re missing, say, if you asked them in a focus group, “What’s wrong with this site?” but they’ll feel it, dare I say even smell it, like pheromones or lack thereof.

Related: A thing doesn’t become loved because it’s great. It becomes great because it’s loved.

“Sometimes all that saves me is being willing to make mistakes. There are projects that strike me as so beautiful, important, complicated, or just plain big, that they convince me of my own inadequacy. This awful state of reverence leads to paralyzing brain freeze. At times like that the only way out is for me to decide, ‘To hell with it. I can’t do it right, so I’ll do it wrong. I can’t do it well, but I can do it badly.’ Sometimes, with luck, while I’m sweating to do it wrong, I stumble on a right way.” —Katherine Dunn

I appreciate her views on doing it badly. First drafts are often terrible, as are second and many seventh drafts. I’ve read so many mediocre drafts and produced so many “eh” drafts, in fact, that I’m beginning to think that what separates professional writers from non-writers is not, as the mystique surrounding literary culture would have us all believe, a matter of observational skill or esoteric intelligence, but process. Writers sweat and stumble more, and do it again and again, wiping dirt off metaphorical knees, until the words begin to sound true in the largest sense of the word True.

But Dunn’s quote also got me thinking about TKs. TK is industry shorthand for “to come” and a convention used in publishing to indicate that a piece of draft copy is missing something. (The misspelling is intentional; TK catches the eye better than TC does.) A TK lets a story editor, copy editor, or production editor know that once this something is found, it will occupy the spot where the TK now sits.

The TK is deliberately vague on length — what takes its place could be a single proper noun or a full paragraph or longer. While that might sound maddening I’d actually like to see TK used more frequently and widely, because it’s honest about how creative work develops. Sturdy communications require this process of revising and tinkering. There are seldom if any lightning-flashes, any aha, that’s the right phrase moments. When they happen, they happen toward the very end.

So I imagine that if more non-writers allowed themselves TKs, they’d learn to love them and the “being willing to make mistakes” too.

When you place TK on the page, you’re signaling, “I need to think harder here. I’m not quite done. But in the meantime, I wanted to get this other surrounding stuff that I’ve already figured out down. Inspiration to fill in this blank will catch me later. Maybe after a walk and some offline stumbling around.”

Amy Einsohn’s The Copyeditor’s Handbook has some great examples of dangling participles:

“Although watched by 25.8 million viewers, the program’s ratings disappointed the advertisers.”

Because it was the program itself that had 25.8 million viewers, and not the ratings, as Einsohn points out, the sentence should read:

“Although the program was watched by 25.8 million viewers, the ratings disappointed the advertisers.”

(Honestly, I don’t even like the “was watched” coupled with “viewers” or depriving advertisers of agency. How about, “Although the program was seen by 25.8 million viewers, advertisers weren’t satisfied”? But that’s fodder for another post.)

Here’s another example, stealthier and more insidious:

“Despite the constant claims that we need more economic growth, there are limits on what growth can do for us.”

The problem with this sentence is that the “limits on what economic growth can do for us” exist entirely independently from “the constant claims that we need more growth.” Those limits on growth would be — in the world, real and palpable — even if there were no constant clamoring for growth. They are real but they don’t have ears. Yet here they’re arranged in an implied dialogue.

This might seem like pedantic quibbling. So what, someone might say; the point is clear enough. That “despite” is a real problem, though. Despite means “in spite of” or “without being affected by,” and thus the clause it kicks off must be modifying something that — logic dictates — can be affected. And there is no such thing in this sentence aside from “us.”

What or who could conceivably be affected? Who could do something despite something? Individuals, pundits, television talking heads. In fact, the sentence is so much more interesting corrected than it is flawed, because correcting it requires that we get specific, say who is doing what, perhaps even name names, maybe throw a punch that lands:

“There are limits to what economic growth can do for us, though you would not know it from Joe Blow’s constant clamoring for more.”

or

“Those who routinely claim that we need more economic growth ignore the brute fact that there are limits to what growth can do.”

or

“Claims that economic growth will solve our problems are made in willful defiance of the truth that economic growth can only accomplish so much.”

I realize now that I haven’t answered my original question of why so many people trip up on dangling participles. I don’t have an answer, unfortunately, but I suspect it’s because we like starting sentences with dependent clauses (whether we know that term or not), and think it makes us sound smart (which it can), but then we unconsciously shy away from our full intended meaning.

*The Copyeditor’s Handbook, Second Edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006)

In the realm of straight, not-funny-and-not-meant-to-be nonfiction writing, an editor might suggest you refrain from “showing your work” (in the math test sense). It’s the same principle. You can add both punch and intrigue to a text by cutting out the prefatory hemming and hawing you think is required.

From the announcement of Triple Canopy’s launch of TC Labs: “Text is not filler, and it is too often treated as such.”

“There are many things a storyteller must add and subtract to tell a good story.” —Lorrie Moore

“There are people whose interests and affections lie in the world of personality, to whom the whole of life is made up of people. Mrs. Alice Freeman Palmer (whom I never met) was such a woman. Not thoughts, not idea, not religions, but people made the universe for her; and this gave her incommunicable, unimaginable access to people’s hearts. She held the keys of them, —thousands of keys to thousands of individuals, —and they each felt themselves to be understood when they met her; they felt as it were, in contact with the power that made them.” —John Jay Chapman on first female college president Alice Freeman Palmer

Editing matters because text is not filler, because good texts require rounds of adding and subtracting, and because editing not only shapes texts so that they’re more readily understood (by strangers), it’s also the experience of having one’s work understood and interrogated (by your editor) on a level rarely encountered on a daily basis, on a level that feels a few small degrees off spiritual. Real developmental editing cannot be done via algorithm and does not scale. It’s slow, inefficient and thus — in this era — practically radical.

If readers get answers to these questions by the end of the second paragraph, they feel trusted.

–seems obvious, but: a character must be trying to do something

–at heart of all narrative film: “Somebody wants something badly and is having difficulty getting it.” —Frank Daniel

–in a three-act structure, second act = immense pressure to change

–writing with the audience in mind ≠ pandering to the audience

–our interest in whether the protagonist gets what she or he wants is (usually) proportionate to that character’s interest in same

–the nature of the objective determines the audience

“What’s the conflict that will tell the story you want to tell?” —Walter Bernstein

“You always come into the scene at the last possible moment.” —William Goldman

–distinguish between conflicts and hassles

–attempts to fashion a story in order to present a philosophical position leads to cliches, so be careful

–supporting players don’t know they’re supporting players

–revelation (the audience knows something a character doesn’t) requires subsequent recognition by that character (or the audience feels robbed!)

“The writer must know what a character wants, consciously or unconsciously, and the writer must know what a character is in pursuit of at any given moment, even if the character is oblivious to it.”

Much of the above, incl. that last quote, appears in David Howard and Edward Mabley’s The Tools of Screenwriting: A Writer’s Guide to the Craft and Elements of a Screenplay. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1993.

UPDATE: A related thought: “The best advice I got in writing narrative non-fiction was to get my hero in trouble and keep him there.” —Deborah Blum

Function: noun

Date: 1809

: means, resources; specifically : the ability and means required to accomplish some task.

“Very tight and compelling—a really well-edited book.”

“A fabulous manuscript, beautifully written, brilliantly argued and illustrated.”

“I’ve worked on a number of first books, and this is easily among the best I’ve seen—well conceived, well researched, and well written. You’ve succeeded in making the text accessible and entertaining.”

And my favorite comment, addressed to me personally:

“You made manuscripts to be animated.” (English was not the writer’s first language. That’s where we came in.)