原虫布丁格

由「故事說不完」發起的，被封狼點名回答：

你最近讀過什麼文章令你印象深刻？為什麼？
如果能檢附連結，以利大家奇文共賞，就請提供吧。：）

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我所挑的其實並非一篇「讀過」的「文章」，而是近來在podcast上聽到的一則與寫作相關對談。因為正好去呼應到不久前工作上發生過的一些狀況，所以決定就選這篇當回答。

這個podcast節目叫做The Writing Show。在此順便向英文聽力沒問題的創作者們推薦一下，個人覺得這對有志寫作的入門者是個十分有幫助的節目，聊的範圍也很廣，從寫作到出版甚至圖像插畫的創作都有，有機會可以訂閱來聽聽看。

我所提的訪談是這篇：
You’ve Finished Writing Your Book. Now What?
With freelance editor and typographer Dick Margulis
‧按此下載該篇訪談的MP３


這次訪談中有許多關於作者態度的部分，我相信對常在網上作創作發表的人而言，應該都不陌生。個人在此稍加粗略筆錄幾段：

1:47

主持人Paula B
"So you're a writer, and you want to publish your book, what should you be thinking about once you've actually finished writing?"

Dick Margulis
"I think the first thing you want to think about when you’re done writing is you’re done writing. Writing is a very personal thing especially with fiction, but even with none-fiction at the subject that you are passionate about. But once you are done writing, your object is to sell books, and a book is a product, so you have to think of it as a product and stop thinking of it as your child. You have to be able to distant yourself from the object.

And I think that is a key transition that a lot of writers especially young writers or people who haven't written something before miss. They miss that transition and so it's just like pulling hair or finger nails out of them when anybody criticizes something or suggests a change and that's not the purpose. The purpose, once you done writing, is let's turn this into a product and that means you have to do all the things involved in making a product in terms of product development.

You have done the creative part, ok great, now it has to go into some kind of production stream, and that it has to get marketed, and then it has to have a product life cycle, just like an engineering product."

Paula B
"What are some other things that writers should be thinking about, when they want to change their mindset? Obviously when that's your child, you are thinking about how perfect you want to make it, and how emotional you want to make the product. You want to have an emotional connection. You as the author have the emotional connection. Of course you'd like to have your reader to have the emotional connection."

Dick Margulis
"Absolutely, and that's all in the content of that you have written. I am not suggesting that that isn't important to you as an individual. What I am saying is you have to be able to distant yourself.

The first writing job I've ever had - and I was young… I think I was 21 at the time. I was a copywriter, for J Walter Thompson (編按：JWT, 美國最大的廣告經記機構), and a junior copywriter. And I go into the first group meeting. We had a little group of 4 or 5 writers and we were writing magazine ads for cars, which I knew nothing about. We had an assignment, and we handed it in on our yellow sulphite scratched paper that we all typed on. I handed my sheet in to the boss, my copy chief, named Ruesell Willis, It’s 1968 that I am talking about. And he started ripping and shredding, and just totally tearing apart the few sentences that I have written. And I started like oh, this guy’s attacking me, and I am a failure, and all these negative feelings that people have when they are criticized the first time. And he saw the moisture welling up in my eyes in front of 4 other people, and he said, ok look. This is not personal. This is about the words on the page.

And that’s a lesson that I took with me, and internalized. And I think everybody needs to do that. It’s not personal. It’s not about you. It’s about the piece of paper, with words on it, and the fact that it’s a medium though which you were trying to communicate something to a reader, and now you have to look at it from the reader’s point of view, not from your own personal point of view."

Paula B
“So if you want to make something into a product, what are the sorts of things you have to consider?”

Dick Margulis
“Well, the first thing you have to consider is: Who’s the audience? Who’s going to want to read this? Why are they going to want to read it? And what’s the best way to communicate with them?

So if an editor says to you, ‘you know that’s kind of an obscure reference there, and this is really sort of a practical book for the average consumer, and they are not gonna get that reference and maybe rather than getting them confused, let’s take that out.’ Well maybe your very favorite phrase in the whole world, but trust the editor on that.

So stepwise, what’s gonna happen is, your manuscript is going be looked at by an editor, probably a development editor who’s going to say, ‘mmmm I am loosing my train of thoughts here. What’s going on? Maybe this section has to be moved here; maybe you need to develop this a little more with friction; maybe this character isn’t resonating with me… seems kind of flat… maybe you need to build him up some more….’ A lot of that goes in fiction in a crit group (編按：critique group), you know before you ever get to an editor, you are in a club with your friends, and you are critiquing each other’s work, and some of those group were great, and some of them aren’t terribly effective, but at some point it’s gonna get to an editor who’s gonna say, ‘ok it’s pretty good, BUT we need to make these changes. I need you to contribute more. You are the writer to fill in these gaps. I don’t know where you are going with this. This argument’s confusing…’

So that kind of things happen at the development stage, and then somebody, maybe the same editor, is gonna line-edit the manuscript, and go through, and fix all those little places where you forgot the rule of grammar, or you misspell something, or it was late at night, and you type words you didn’t intent to type. But all that’s gonna get corrected, and it’s gonna go back to you when you, you know, this is gonna be a dialogue. Working with an editor is a dialogue. You have to be comfortable with the editor. The editor has to be comfortable with you, but together you are trying to make the product good enough. Not perfect, because there is no perfect. And even though we’re all perfectionists in this business, we also have to realistically say, perfection is a goal, but it’s not something we’ll realistically obtain, so yeah you can’t beat yourself up for something you missed three books ago. You just go forward.

Once the editing is done, somebody is going to design the book that’s typically not something the author puts a lot of energy into other than saying yeah I like it no I don’t like it can you move this thing around because it’s ugly. But a professional designer should really design the book. Then it’s a publishing project. It has to be type-set. It has to be printed. It has to go into distributing marketing chain if it’s going to bookstores, or you have to some other ways of selling it. The back of the room when you are talking, or however it’s gonna happen.”

Paula B
“Let’s talk the editing step because that’s the first thing after the writer is done with it or sometimes it happens concurrently back and forth. First of all, in your experience, do you think writers –most writers- are capable of editing their own work?”

Dick Margulis
“Well, I don’t think anybody is really capable of editing their own work. Writers who are writers, that is they are not just subject matter experts, but people who treat words with reference and respect, can be very good editors. That’s why crit group is very good. But it’s almost impossible to really edit your own work. You can certainly go back and draft and redraft and redraft it and clean it up the best you can, but you gonna miss stuff because you wrote it, and even if you set it aside and come back a week later you are gonna find things that you missed the first time, and a lot of authors do that. A lot of writers do that. But you really… I mean, I need an editor. If you read my blog, there’s all kind of stuff that if you were editing it, you would take out. I know that. We get too attached to own works.

George Orwell had the classic line which is ‘murder your darlings’. He wasn’t the first person to have said it. He had the most colourful way of saying it. If there’s a phrase, a word, a sentence that you are just absolutely in love with the sound of it, take it out because nobody is going to get it but you. So that is what’s meant by the phrase. And it’s much easier for an editor to do that to you than for you to do it to yourself. So editing is critical from that stand point. It’s just critical from the stand point the editor is the reader’s representative. You as a writer are probably too close to what you wrote, and are missing that outside perspective, so editing is an absolutely critical step.”

47:00
Paula B
“Who else gets involved with either the cover design or the typography, and has to approve it?”

Dick Margulis
“Well, depends if it is a self-published book, or if it’s going through a commercial publisher. If it’s commercial publisher, the author really has very little saying in any of these, and the publisher is going to hire either freelance designer or have it done in-house depending on the publishing company. It’s a publishing function, not an authoring function. Some writers get into a little bit troubles because they try to be designer as they are writing. They should probably focus on the writing. Unless there is some reason that the graphic presentation is important to the content, which happens to certain types of books, certainly. I think the writing should concentrate on writing, even the self-published writers.”


1:17:38
Paula B
“From what you’ve seem, what do you think are some of the biggest mistakes that writers make? I don’t just mean with the writing, but in any step that you are familiar with.”

Dick Margulis
“I think that the biggest mistake that they make has to do with attitude. Again that goes back to the fact that writers tend to be fairly fragile. Not all of them. But if we’re gonna generalise it, I think a lot of them. And they tent to misapprehend criticism as being personal, so they get defensive. And they get defensive, and they also get arrogant, and they also presume that because they are the expert, and they know what they mean to say, and you are just a lowly vender, you can’t possibly know anything.

It’s sort of natural human thing that people do, but I think that creates problems because they stop listening. I think writers have to listen when they are being advised on how to market a book, how to turn it into a product, how to make profit on it. Because in the end, unless you were independently wealthy, the amount of time you spent writing, at some point, you’d like to get compensated for it to some extend. So you really need to listen to the professional you are engaging with. Sometimes you are gonna be right and they are gonna be wrong, but you have to participate in the discussion, and respect each other. If the writer comes with an attitude of distained people, which is an attitude that you see sometimes, they are gonna make bad decisions.”


其他的，其實我也不知道還需要再加什麼，因為該說的都在上面的內容說完了。

踏入職場三年的經驗讓我漸漸了解，在創作與商業混合的狀況下，一個產品從開發到販售是一整個團隊合作的流程，每個環節都有特定該負責的人，缺少了一項，這個產品就無法抵達終點的市場上。而各環節所負責的人都各自有其立場、該管與不該管的事情，很多條件原本就是無法讓任何一方完全去決定與掌握。

就是這樣一回事而已。要嘛就自己出錢當老闆，沒有作老闆的命就認清自己該管的部分，免得成天為一些沒有成效的憂慮而困擾。做人還是實在一點比較好，一旦生活踏實了，心情也會比較愉快一些。

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點名的部分．．．　突然發現我朋友真少，一時間還想不出可以抓誰。

那就yhvh、Teresa、小白姐姐。

有看到再來認領！