Every year I attend a national conference of editorial writers and listen to
us deliver critiques of one another's work. It can be a dispiriting
experience, especially when the editorial under the microscope is one's own.
But one thing I've learned:
After the editorial being dissected has lost its news value, all that may
remain is a desiccated husk - dry, brittle, the same old party line or empty
stridency. But if the editorial being examined had more than news value, if
it used the news of the day only as a jumping-off point to say something
about the human condition, preferably something of depth and value, even of
use and beauty, it still interests months, even years, later.
I like what a fiction writer named Nancy Mairs once said: "The trick, with
this as with any genre, is to satisfy its requirements while escaping its
confines." That's it. The reader's expectations of an editorial, however
minimal, should be met. But it's a poor editorial that doesn't go beyond
that minimal expectation.
An editorial should express an opinion - about a news event or a public
figure or a local ordinance or even the weather - but go beyond the confines
of its subject to say something about life in these times, or even first
principles. Flaubert would have made a great editorial writer. He took a
subject as common as an adulterous wife in a small town and made "Madame
Bovary" out of it. He went beyond the confines of his subject.
The successful editorial, or even newspaper column, has gone to a second
level. It is still alive long after it appeared in that most ephemeral of
products, your daily newspaper.
Too drearily often, we who write editorials don't escape the confines of the
form or the subject. Instead of thought, we offer ideology. Instead of
laughter, just general irritation with the world. We who write them fail to
break the bounds of the news we're writing about and let a revealing light
in.
Routine is our deadliest enemy. It's as if editorial writers didn't dare
risk a real, original idea. That would involve real work. So we wind up
speechifying at a faceless audience instead of addressing a real reader. Or
kicking a few platitudes around and calling it opinion.
To judge from the general tone of the conversation at this year's
convention, the state of American editorial writing is... well, it's been
better. It's not just the economic crunch in which the newspaper business
finds itself these days. It's not even the familiar problem of getting the
younger generation to put down its cell phones and iPods long enough to read
a newspaper. It's something more - a general malaise about the whole
calling. A doctor would call it A Failure to Thrive.
What would really be new and enlivening at this depressing juncture in the
history of American editorializing would be a return to the old: the old
standards, old competencies, old revelations - not in order to replace
whatever's new today but to lend it some saving perspective.
Here's a word from the past: The late Grover C. Hall Jr. wrote editorials
for the grand old Montgomery Advertiser in an era when Southern newspapers
led all the rest because they had character, and characters. I've got an
editorial of Mr. Hall's framed on my office wall. In it, he pointed out that
editorial writers have got the grandest job in the world. So why not write
like it?
In the end, what matters is what always mattered: the words, the words, the
words. And what's really the matter with editorial writing is a loss of
faith - in words, in the power they represent, and in our power to use them.
Or to let them use us. For the best thought has an irresistible power of its
own.
The surest symptom of our malaise is the various cures recommended for the
sad state of the American editorial. Some are familiar panaceas, the kind
that have never worked but are rolled out every year as if they were brand
new. For example, somebody always suggests that we start signing our
editorials. Yes, we're talking about the same editorials we write, rewrite,
edit, talk about, and then have our publisher approve - if the publisher
didn't suggest the editorial in the first place. So how many names would we
have to sign at the bottom of each editorial? At that rate, the byline would
be longer than the editorial.
More to the point, the whole notion of a signed editorial is a contradiction
in terms. For then the editorial would no longer represent the newspaper's
opinion but an individual's. Why not just write a signed column and be done
with it? Start signing editorials and the idea that the newspaper has an
opinion, a personality, a tradition and continuous history of its own would
become just a formality.
Then there are those who believe that, to restore this patient's old
vitality, what's required is a technological fix. Maybe turn the editorial
column into a community forum, a kind of electronic bulletin board. (In that
case, what would Letters to the Editor be for?) Or transform the editorials
into blogs. But that's not writing, it's talking.
There ought to be something premeditated, even with malice aforethought,
about committing an editorial. If the reader just wanted to talk, or read
instant opinion, all he'd need do is eavesdrop on cell-phone conversations,
God help him.
The essence of an editorial is that it's the product of an editor. This
fascination with technique - how to set up a blog, how to get on the
Internet, how to do this or do that - is not a good sign. I think it was
Raymond Carver, the short story writer, who said that, when a writer wants
to write about technique, it means he's run out of anything to say.