Divinipotent About Editors v. Writers

"Editing is the same as quarreling with writers — same thing exactly."
~ Harold Ross

Just like labor and management, liberals and conservatives, parents and teenagers and the Yankees and the Red Sox, editors and writers are engaged in an endless, ritualized struggle for dominance. We writers agonize over our words, sentences, paragraphs and chapters; we come to love them and want to protect them. But editors believe they stand for the reader. They hate the words that slow them, confuse them or drive them to unplanned reverie about laundry loads and grocery lists. And so the struggle continues.

However, on the subject of censorship, writers and editors stand with arms linked, feet planted firmly, minds finally in agreement. This is Banned Books Week. Keep the harmony going and help fight censorship.

"Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar-room vernacular, that is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive."
~ Raymond Chandler

"Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers."
~ T. S. Eliot