editing Pynchon?

[Doug Millison]

I've worked as an editor - magazines, books, Web sites - for nearly 30  
years, and have encountered manuscripts that required everything from  
almost total rewriting, factchecking, copyediting (line by line, word  
by word), to pieces that could stand without any more work.

At some point in the 90s, I realized that in my capacity as a  
freelance writer, what a wonderful find I have been for editors,  
because I had generally been able to deliver the stories that I  
promised, on time, requiring only minimal copyediting.  For a few  
years, I delivered thousands of words/day of news stories, interviews,  
features, etc., that were translated into Dutch, Japanese, French,  
German with minimal additional work by the editors of the various  
national editions of Computerworld, PC Week, and many other business  
magazines.

I've also supervised the work of editors, on business and general  
reader book and magazine projects, and mass market and business-to- 
business Web sites.

In my experience, sometimes all an editor has to do is find and pose  
the right question or make a simple suggestion, to motivate a writer  
to create a work in the first place, or to shape it further.   
Sometimes a writer needs feedback from somebody who understands the  
project at a deep level and who can at the same time stand back and  
judge which parts don't seem to fit or aren't working.

If Pynchon did meet an editor able to dig in and cut, rewrite, add,  
and otherwise make major transformations to his texts, in the process  
improving them and making them "better" as a result, that editor would  
be a remarkable talent, don't you think? I've often wondered if that  
was the case with GR and Faith Sale, but nobody I've talked with has  
been able to shed any light on how much she actually did to Pynchon's  
manuscript.

I continue to suspect that Pynchon is a genius, tapping mysteriously  
deep springs of creative inspiration in his unique response to the  
world through his art.