Simultaneously Objective and Subjective

From 1983 until 2011 — twen­ty-eight years — I worked with the late Richard Jack­son as my edi­tor. Dur­ing that time he was at Brad­bury (his com­pa­ny), Macmil­lan, Orchard, and then Atheneum. If I count cor­rect­ly, I believe we cre­at­ed some twen­ty-five books togeth­er. They ranged from pic­ture books to nov­els and includ­ed The True Con­fes­sions of Char­lotte Doyle, Noth­ing but the Truth, and Pop­py, which sug­gests the range of the books on which we worked. Indeed, he edit­ed many, many dif­fer­ent kinds of writ­ers such as Judy Bloom, Paula Fox, and Bri­an Floca.

He had the skill (among many skills) of being able to work with a wide vari­ety of artists and writ­ers, hav­ing the abil­i­ty to relate to them and their work accord­ing to their dif­fer­ent tal­ents, meth­ods, and (not least) per­son­al­i­ties. In fact, dur­ing the few times when I was with him when he was with a num­ber of his peo­ple, he was uncom­fort­able, as if not sure how to act with such a var­ied group. He was at his best one on one.

When we spoke it was most­ly by phone (no e‑mails then) and these ses­sions were extreme­ly cre­ative, work­ing out prob­lems and ideas, the talk punc­tu­at­ed by much laugh­ter. I came to think of him as my good friend. Not to say that he thought of me that way (I won’t pre­sume) but he was always so focused on what we were work­ing on that he made me feel that way. I had great trust in his judgments.

Indeed, one of the things that amazed me about the way he worked was that even though he worked on many projects at the same time, if I called and raised a ques­tion about a point in such and such a book, he was instant­ly and ful­ly con­nect­ed to our project. It was not brava­do. He always could con­nect — spot on — to the book. 

Anoth­er aspect of our work togeth­er — and let it be under­stood I assume he worked dif­fer­ent­ly with every­one — is that when we had come to the end of a project, which is to say when we both agreed a book was done, a few weeks would go by, and then I’d receive a call from him. “I’ve been think­ing,” he would begin such con­ver­sa­tions. Then he would tell me that he had real­ized that one aspect of the book need­ed clar­i­fi­ca­tion, revis­ing, rewrit­ing, etc. It might be big or small. In oth­er words, though we had both agreed the book had been done, he had kept think­ing about it.

That was because he was more than the tex­tu­al edi­tor of the book. He engaged him­self in all aspects of the book’s evo­lu­tion, from talk­ing about the idea for the book, and the edit­ing of the text, to the phys­i­cal pro­duc­tion, and its mar­ket­ing. One might think every edi­tor works that way. Alas, no.

More than any­thing, what I expe­ri­enced with him was the key com­po­nent of pro­fes­sion­al writ­ing: the need to be simul­ta­ne­ous­ly objec­tive and sub­jec­tive about one’s work. That is, the writer must be crit­i­cal of his/her work, with­out neglect­ing the sub­jec­tive emo­tion­al, and even intu­itive engage­ment with the work. The writer must be simul­ta­ne­ous­ly an emo­tion­al writer and an objec­tive read­er. It is that bifur­cat­ed way of writ­ing which is essen­tial to craft a good piece of writing.

And that — as I knew him — was Richard Jackson’s great talent.