(2023-02-18) Johnson Beyond The Semicolon

Steven Johnson: Beyond The Semicolon. ...a gap that had generally gone unmentioned in the Creative Workflow series here: the role of a great Editor in helping you refine your ideas.

When I was writing Enemy of All Mankind—a book that involved narrative events that literally spanned millennia, and wove together characters living on four continents—my editor Courtney Young constructed an entire “crazy-wall” straight out of The Usual Suspects to figure out a structure and sequence that could make all those different elements coherent to the reader.

there’s not much time spent on the question of what those of us who don’t write or edit books for a living can learn from their enormously productive partnership

I do think there is a wider lesson, one that is directly relevant to the question of building a workflow for thinking. It is an amazing gift to have someone who is—at least in your interactions with them—wholly focused on making your ideas better. (pairing)

We’ve talked a lot about the power of networks and colliding with other people’s ideas: the whole coffeehouse model of creativity, where you meet someone who is cultivating their own hunch that complements yours in some unpredictable and generative way. But an editor traditionally plays a different role. Their mandate is to find the genius that is somewhere latent in your own ideas, to help bring it to the surface of your prose.

from a distance, it seems like the role of a professional “coach”—the person you meet with every few weeks to talk through what’s happening in your career, somewhere between a mentor and therapist—probably comes closest to it. (coaching)