Como escrever (em ingles) - Wall Street Journal
Autor: Paulo Roberto de Almeida | Publicado: 2013-01-22T00:22:00-04:00



BOOKSHELF
January 18, 2013, The Wall Street Journal


The Special Relationship


A Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and his longtime editor offer a guide to the craft of nonfiction. 


   



By SCOTT STOSSEL
            
When Richard Todd and 
Tracy Kidder met, in the early 1970s, the first was a young editor at 
the Atlantic Monthly and the second an ambitious, if barely published, 
writer. Mr. Kidder was struggling with his first piece for the magazine,
 rewriting and rewriting without being able to make it cohere. Robert 
Manning, the magazine's editor, got exasperated. "Let's face it, this 
fellow can't write," he declared. But Mr. Todd kept his boss's opinion 
to himself and kept Mr. Kidder working on the piece, which was about a 
murder in California. It appeared in the magazine in July 1973, and a 
few years later Mr. Kidder, with more articles under his belt and with 
Mr. Todd still his editor, would win both the Pulitzer Prize and the 
National Book Award for "The Soul of a New Machine," about how Data 
General engineered a new computer. 



                
Good Prose
By Richard Todd and Tracy Kidder
                    
  
 Random House, 195 pages, $26


            



                



Enlarge Image






Richard Petrucci
                
fruits of collaboration Two 
  
   
  
 of Tracy Kidder's many stories, edited by Richard Todd, for the Atlantic.



What if 
Mr. Todd had agreed with Manning and spiked the piece? Would the 
author's fragile spirit have been broken under the weight of the 
editor's judgment, his writing career derailed? Probably not: Mr. Kidder
 had ambition and talent. But one can't know for certain. And the 
lessons here aren't just about perseverance or the importance of 
revision—though Mr. Kidder still does an average of 10 complete drafts 
of all his work—but also about the nature of the relationship between 
editor and author. Messrs. Kidder and Todd's "practical" guide to 
writing, drawn from 40 years of working together, is called "Good Prose:
 The Art of Nonfiction," but the book's subtitle might as well have 
been, to borrow a line from its introduction, "the story of a 
collaboration and a friendship."

Relationships between writers and 
editors can be vexed, and vexing. When the publisher Robert Giroux asked
 T.S. Eliot if he subscribed to the adage that most editors are failed 
writers, Eliot said that he did. But then he added, "So are most 
writers"—a maxim that many a beleaguered editor, toiling behind the 
scenes to fix broken prose, will be quick to endorse. Michael Kinsley, a
 longtime editor at magazines like Harper's, the New Republic and Slate,
 is reputed to have said that the ideal writer is the one who files his 
piece and then gets run over by a bus, so the editor can rewrite with 
impunity. On the other hand, as Messrs. Kidder and Todd advise, editors 
do well to remember that, ultimately, "editors need writers more than 
the reverse." Many writers view editors, sometimes not without reason, 
as parasites subsisting on the life and voice they leach from prose. 
This is true even though many editors—including Mr. Todd, the author of a
 very good previous book about authenticity, "The Thing Itself" 
(2008)—are themselves writers, and vice versa. Sometimes an editor or 
writer will switch teams permanently in frustration. A few years ago, I 
heard that the editor in chief of a prestigious magazine had stepped 
down to become a fairly junior writer at another, less prestigious 
publication. Why, I asked, had he chosen to do that? "I was tired of 
always being the solution," he said. "I wanted to be the problem for a 
while." 

Messrs. Kidder and Todd claim that one 
reason their relationship remained productive for so many years was that
 "we shared a code common to men of our era, which meant that we didn't 
expect much, or feel like offering much, in the way of intimacy or 
'sharing.' " Maybe so, but in a sense they were exceptionally intimate: 
One of the secrets of Mr. Kidder's success is that he is not afraid of 
writing badly in front of his editor, which frees him from the paralysis
 of writer's block. I've worked as a magazine editor for 20 years and 
done some writing on the side, and I'd say that the relationship you 
have with your editor should be like the one you have with your 
urologist—you should feel comfortable showing him unspeakable, 
embarrassing things and trust that he will not recoil but endeavor 
straightforwardly and discreetly to help. (The writer-editor 
relationship should also have a confidentiality akin to attorney-client 
privilege or, perhaps more aptly, to that of the psychiatric couch.) 

Another reason Messrs. Kidder and Todd 
have thrived together for decades is that "each of us imagined himself 
more forbearing than the other, and as a rule kept our irritations to 
ourselves." But despite their mutual forbearance, by this account author
 and editor play largely to type. Mr. Kidder assumes the traditional 
writer's role of perpetual adolescent ("Is your eldest at home?" Mr. 
Todd once said over the phone to his author's wife), while Mr. Todd 
takes the role of avuncular guide, treating his wayward charge with 
bemused irony. 

Divided into chapters on beginnings, 
narrative, memoir, essays, dealing with facts, style, the business of 
writing, editing and being edited, and a usage guide, "Good Prose" mixes
 memoir and instruction, with sections written from the writer's 
perspective, sections written from the editor's, and sections written 
together. While unconventional, this structure doesn't feel disjointed. 
You are in such good company—congenial, ironic, a bit old-school—that 
you're happy to follow them where they lead you. Reading their chapter 
on narrative structure, you know they've put careful thought into how to
 organize the book. "The fundamental elements of a story's structure are
 proportion and order," they write. "Managing proportion is the art of 
making some things big and other things little: of creating foreground 
and background; of making readers feel the relative importance of 
characters, events, ideas, of deciding where the accents go. Often it 
means upsetting normal expectations by finding a superficial trivial 
detail or moment that, on closer examination, resonates with meaning."

For me, the memoirish sections hold 
special fascination, because they cover life in the 1970s at the 
Atlantic, the magazine where I work now. "Every month the staff argued 
over the magazine's cover and usually ended up with something colorful 
and overstated, in the vain hope that a touch of raciness would improve 
newsstand sales," the authors write. "But the covers threatened the 
magazine's cultural legitimacy, the real attraction for its true 
audience and for many who worked there." Four decades later this hits 
closer to home than I should like to admit—but I find it reassuring to 
learn that the Atlantic's editors then worried that they, too, might be 
spending down the magazine's cultural patrimony. (There are, of course, 
significant differences between then and now, too. The long boozy 
lunches at the Ritz-Carlton Bar, for instance, have been replaced by the
 Potbelly sandwich scarfed down at the desk.) 

In dispensing advice, Messrs. Kidder 
and Todd draw on their long experience. For instance, to provide a sense
 of the volume of reporting necessary to produce a good book—and of the 
distilling process necessary to find the story among mere 
information—they reveal that Mr. Kidder drew his book "Among 
Schoolchildren" from 152 notebooks worth of material. They also draw 
artfully on examples from a disparate range of the best nonfiction (and 
some fiction) writers, past and present, from usual suspects like 
Emerson and Orwell and mid-century masters like A.J. Liebling, Truman 
Capote and Joan Didion to Jon Krakauer, Katherine Boo and David Foster 
Wallace. As a curriculum for the aspiring writer, the choices would be 
hard to surpass.

Messrs. Kidder and Todd articulate 
sturdy general principles and useful techniques, without ever being 
didactic. Some of their choicest bits of advice are dispensed as 
aphoristic bits of wisdom.

If you're not writing for a newspaper, 
go ahead and bury the lead (or the "lede," as the newspaperfolk spell 
it)—because "the heart of the story is a place to arrive at, not to 
begin." 

"The image that calls attention to 
itself is also the image you can do without." (Maybe I should have 
dropped that urologist metaphor.)

If you are writing a memoir, "try to accept that you are, in company with everyone else, in part a comic figure." 

Perhaps most important: "Writing is revision." 

And finally: "The familiar rules about 
writing turn out to be more nearly half-truths, dangerous if taken 
literally. They are handy as correctives, but not very useful as 
instruction."

The chapter on the essay ("the natural 
medium for ideas") is particularly good. "Essays let you second-guess 
yourself, even contradict yourself in front of the reader," they write. 
"Self-doubt, fatal in so many enterprises, fortifies the essay." 

Perhaps because many books about 
writing are in one way or another so dreary—so fussy or technical or 
boring—the good ones tend to stand out: H.W. Fowler's "Modern English 
Usage" (1926); Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style" (1959); 
William Zinsser's "On Writing Well" (1976); Anne Lamott's "Bird by Bird"
 (1995); Stephen King's "On Writing" (2000). "Good Prose" at least 
knocks on the door of this pantheon. 

Yet a book focusing on the 
writer-editor relationship inevitably feels somewhat dusty in the age of
 the blog and the tweet, when it's a truism that book editors no longer 
edit because they're too busy with marketing, when dwindling amounts of 
time and money have made editing a luxury and editors themselves, 
increasingly, a rarity at every kind of periodical. The tyranny of the 
page view—the metric by which much journalism is measured these 
days—tends to demand a velocity that leaves little time for correcting 
prose, much less the extended writer-editor colloquies of the sort 
Messrs. Kidder and Todd have profitably engaged in for four decades. 
Like those martini-saturated lunches at the Ritz, such colloquies can 
seem today like an indulgent treat, the relic of some antediluvian age.

Still, I believe it remains the case 
that, as William Whitworth, once the protégé of the New Yorker editor 
William Shawn and later Robert Manning's successor as editor of the 
Atlantic (and also, for a time, my boss), puts it to Messrs. Kidder and 
Todd: "All writers could use another pair of eyes." Anyone who has read 
my Twitter feed would agree.

—Mr. Stossel is the editor of the Atlantic 
magazine. He is writing a book about anxiety and can be found, unedited,
 on Twitter as @sstossel.

A version of this article appeared January 19,
 2013, on page C5 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with 
the headline: The Special Relationship.