In a message dated 3/18/12 2:19:44 PM, [email protected] writes:
> Everything I feel about the work, all of my a.e. comes from the > work > I agree with that. > > Does it matter knowing what the artist pondered before beginning his work, > what he weighed and which options he chose? > Matter to whom? As an editor, one of my jobs was to diagnose what the ailment was when a novel was not "working". This turns out not to be so easy for some editors. Some editors can have very good sensibilities: They can say, "Something's wrong. I can't put my finger on it, but I know this won't win his long-time fans" and be right. Being able to examine the various stages of the writer's acts of creation can be a helpful diagnostic tool. The same tool can be applied to an editor. Recall what I called "prelibation" -- the yearning for what, generically, should come next. This requires what I call "salivant" sensibility, as distinguished from "gustatory". Think of 'salivancy' as appetite. Gustatory is important at the end. It says, yes, that tastes good. (Or no.) Salivancy does not judge believability; gustatory does. Strangely, some editors and writers can have good salivant sensibility but mediocre gustatory. Some pop composers are great at the music, lousy at the lyrics. Some dramatists are nifty with the lingo, but can't sense we don't give a damn about the characters. The best editor has to have imagination, not just judgment. Espying a superfluous character is a skill an editor can be taught. But realizing there is a character "missing" is perhaps the hardest single thing for an editor to do. Before every act of sensibility there comes an act of imagination that offers up something the sensibility must judge. As I said, the visual artists on the forum may comment that all this stuff might apply to storytellers, but not to them.
