Hamilton Nolan thinks so and he writes about what happens when too many editors take their turns with a story: "If you believe that having four editors edit a story produces a better story than having one editor edit a story, I submit that you have the small mind of a middle manager, and should be employed not in journalism but in something more appropriate for your numbers-based outlook on life, like carpet sales." A response from Jack Limpert.
Writers and writing
Do you labor for hours over a piece of writing, only to be embarrassed when a spelling mistake or other error is discovered after it's published? Don't worry, writes Nick Stockton. It just means that your brain is working at a high level: "We can become blind to details because our brain is operating on instinct. By the time you proof read your own work, your brain already knows the destination. This explains why your readers are more likely to pick up on your errors."
"In May of 1839," Maria Popova writes, "Herman Melville found himself riveted by an article in the New York monthly magazine The Knickerbocker about a 'renowned monster, who had come off victorious in a hundred fights with his pursuers' — a formidable albino whale named Mocha Dick." What happened after that is well known, but Popova adds to the backstory with some illustrations from a new "picture-book biography" on the real-life whale that captivated Melville.
For a long time, Sarah Callender was a skeptic on the subject of writer's block: "Meryl Streep doesn't suddenly find herself unable to act. Barbara Walters doesn't suddenly find herself unable to ask nosy, semi-inappropriate questions." But over time, Callender writes, she came to believe that writer's block is real: "How do I know? Because Writer's Block is almost always the result of doubt, and doubt loiters and lollygags in the heart and head of every serious writer."
Karin Gillespie dreamed of being published in the Gray Lady, but when it finally happened, her big moment came and went in a New York minute. She writes about her experience on Writer Unboxed: "My initial motivation for writing the piece was to increase my platform and thus become cat nip for Big-Five editors. That didn't happen. What did happen was I heard from dozens of readers who passionately connected with my words. And, of course, that's ultimately why I write."
The songwriter talks about creativity on Brain Pickings: "I have found that the key to not being blocked is to not worry about it. Ever. If you are sitting down and you feel that you want to write and nothing is coming, you get up and do something else. Then you come back again and try it again. But you do it in a relaxed manner. Trust that it will be there … It always comes back and the only thing that is a problem is when you get in your own way worrying about it."
Maria Popova unearths a passage from Canadian science writer Dan Falk's book The Science of Shakespeare, in which Falk suggests that the influence of the father of modern science is seen when the god Jupiter appears in a central character's dream in the final act of the bard's Cymbeline: "Jupiter is not alone in the scene: Just below him, we see four ghosts moving in a circle … Could the four ghosts represent the four moons of Jupiter, newly discovered by Galileo?"
He waited five months to post it, but Conor Friedersdorf, who puts out a weekly newsletter called The Best of Journalism, offers his personal list of 100-plus outstanding non-fiction stories from the past year. Categories include "The Art of the Personal Essay," "Man vs. Nature," "Sports & Leisure," "War & Peace," "Science and Beyond," and "Arts, Letters and Entertainment." Also, some observations on the list from Angela Washeck.
Maya Angelou's death prompted posts on her life and work, such as this from her Paris Review interview: "I'll read something, maybe the Psalms, maybe, again, something from Mr. Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson. And I'll remember how beautiful, how pliable the language is, how it will lend itself. If you pull it, it says, 'OK.'" More from Maria Popova, and Poynter's Roy Peter Clark on what journalists can learn from Angelou.
Maria Popova celebrates the Victorian journalist's New York World series on mental health care, which she investigated first-hand by feigning insanity and getting committed to an asylum: "The further down the rabbit hole of mental health care Bly tumbled, as she successfully fooled the authorities into pronouncing her insane, the more keenly aware she became of the degree of darkness that enveloped those 'poor unfortunates' who entered the system against their will."