The Editor of the Breakfast Table, by Charles J. Shields

In his New York Times review of Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee (2006), Garrison Keillor characterizes the book's author, Charles J. Shields, as "a former English teacher who taught Harper Lee's book, and a scrupulous journalist who respects the lady's privacy even as he opens up her life." What Keillor doesn't mention is that Charles Shields studied his craft by the side of another scrupulous journalist, his own father.

As you read, think of the editors in your own life--friends, family members, teachers--and consider what lessons we all might learn from a "newspaperman" and from his son.

The Editor of the Breakfast Table

by Charles J. Shields

I groaned. I sighed. Beneath the table, I pounded my fist on my knee.

The old man was at it again: editing one of my papers for class.

“Now, I know this is tough,” he would say, “but this will make you a better writer.” Then, cruel as a Cossack, he would slash through a sentence--often one of my cleverest, I thought--with his red pencil.

More of my precious words fell dead.

My father was a journalist, or a “newspaperman,” as he preferred to call himself. He began his career on a two-man weekly in a shipbuilding town on the Delaware River. The printer was a drunk who slept on a mattress in the back. Then Dad moved up to reporter for the Philadelphia Bulletin chasing fire trucks and ambulances for stories. He liked to tell a story about the editor who made him call back over and over with more and more details from the scene of a fire, until he finally got the point: get all the information you can the first time.

For several years, he worked in public relations for Ford Motor Company in Detroit. Those were the go-go years of tailfins, sharkskin suits, and big bonuses. But eventually, he returned to his first love, newspaper work. During the years that my high school essays and reports came under his scrutiny, he worked for a large suburban newspaper outside Chicago.

“Look, Dad,” I would plead, “I really gotta go. I don’t have time to retype this!”

Perhaps from his delight at working under deadline pressure, he would always present my copyedited paper to me at breakfast, about an hour before I had to be at school. There it lay, beside my plate, marked-up with squiggles, circles, and STETs--the arcana of the trade known mainly to professional editors. At a glance it looked like my poor essay had fallen overnight into the hands of prehistoric cave painters.

“All right, let’s start at the top,” Dad would say, in a friendly tone. “The title is interesting, but it doesn’t really have much to do with what follows, does it?”

“Doesn’t it?”

“No. Don’t make the reader work too hard. Draw the person in. Don’t confuse him right away.”

“I suppose not....”

And so it would go.

He would point out places where I had committed serious stylistic errors: writing sentences that began with long dependent clauses (“Don’t keep the reader waiting for the meaning.”); using a strident, hectoring tone (“Alienate the reader by preaching and you’ll never get him back.”); babbling on about something irrelevant (“The worse thing you can have a reader say is, ‘So what?’”).

The rest--punctuation, paragraph structure, verb tense--he expected me to know. Or if I didn’t to look it up. He always did, despite years writing thousands of words a day. His shelf of reference works was like a row of tools above a workman’s bench. Books on grammar, books on style, books on editing, books on narrative--each one addressing some aspect of the craft of writing.

“I realized when I was in my 20s,” he told me, “that writing must be more than hit or miss. That there must be methods you could use to be a better writer. And that’s when I began reading about writing.”

Concluded on page two