Editorial Expectations Quotes

In the long run, the quality of your work is all that matters. That is your only resumé. Be professional. Make sure your editor or publisher can always reach you. Do what's asked of you if your conscience can bear it.

In the long run, the quality of your work is all that matters. That is your only resumé. Be professional. Make sure your editor or publisher can always reach you. Do what's asked of you if your conscience can bear it. But know that, five years from now, as fans or prospective employers are looking over your published pages, no one will care that this story sucks because the publisher moved the deadline up or because the editor made you work an android cow into the story. All they will care about is what they see in front of them, and they will hold you responsible for it, no one else.

Now I'm instantly nervous about the demands of doing a weekly column.

I very early caught on that the editor of Cincinnati Post had something specific in mind that he was looking for, and I tried to accommodate him in order to get published. I would turn out rough idea after rough idea, and he would veto eighty percent of them. I pretty much prostituted myself for six months but I couldn't please him, so he sent me packing.

Reporters have a different point of view and a different job. Consequently, to the extent that you can help them turn in an interesting story that their editor is going to like and that's going to further their careers, they're going to give you more ink and cover you.

You have to be very careful to view yourself with a somewhat skeptical eye and to remember that you're not here taking down everything I'm saying because you think I'm such a marvelous fellow but because your editors say go get 1,200 words or whatever on Chuck Heston.

Comics have a caste system - an editor has to act in a certain way, an artist has to be humble.

I was spurred by the fact that having worked for women's magazines myself as a journalist, if you go off and interview a female celebrity, I'd just go in and interview them like I'd interview any human being and talk about the things that interested me. And you'd come back, and you'd file your copy. And then my editor would read through my copy and go, why haven't you asked them if they want kids? And I'd be like, well, I don't know, I interviewed Aerosmith last week. And I didn't ask them that.

My guess is that the editor [Cincinnati Post] wanted his own Jeff MacNelly (a Pulitzer winner at 24), and I didn't live up to his expectations. My Cincinnati days were pretty Kafkaesque.