As promised and let me explain: When I started Sassy magazine, everything was done on paper. I had three writers: Karen, Catherine the great, and Christina, whose beautiful writing you’ve seen here this week and other times on AJPT from day one (it's been an almost superstitious thing for me with every project I have launched since Sassy to have Christina there from the very beginning).
Most of those early Sassy magazine stories came to me from the writers (I was the only editor) as fledgling ideas, sometimes a few paragraphs long or sometimes just the beginning concept with no conclusion. Many of us hadn't produced complete stories for publication at that point anyway, and I wanted to do it all differently, so we were making it up as we went along. I would take these printed out double-spaced drafts and use a red pen to write notes all over them - in the margins, on the backs of pages, wherever I could fit them - about direction and what I thought could change and, most of all, because these non-writers were so voicey and unique, what I loved so much about a statement they made or a new phrasing they concocted.
I started on those early stories using one checkmark with an underline of the line that was so great, but then when the written things were even greater and greater, I started doing multiple checkmarks, adding a plus sign at the end of the final check, and then when I read something truly earth shattering, the checks would run off the right side of the page. I LOVE reading good (in my book, good) writing. It's still difficult for me now to read something I like without jumping up, screaming, shouting, rejoicing and leaving red check marks all over it.
Which brings me to Christina's most recent piece about her birthday (which is today! In lieu of flowers, you can subscribe to this Substack or send her a sweet note in these comments - whichever moves you). For old time’s sake, as I was reading her latest AJPT piece, I screenshot her manuscript and wrote on it with my clumsy finger (see all these phone images of it here) and sent them to her. It's not quite the same as back at Sassy, because I can’t scrawl enough on these to replicate the pen-filled printer pages that I am talking about - and which prompted the writers to say things to each other like, "I got my story back from Jane and it's bleeding all over.”
But it's funny when we're all reading Christina's story now and you point out how much a certain line struck you and then I get to look back at these and see that those were lines I marked also.
More important is this gem that Christina located when we were talking about the piece after it was published. (I love love love doing postmortems - I used to reread every issue of Sassy and Jane probably 20 times or more, pretending to be a new reader each time to see what struck me as great or not so great. I would put it on my coffee table at home with other magazines and walk past it again and again to see if I wanted to pick it up. I was and am obsessed, yes.) Christina discovered this picture that she hadn’t found in time to put it into the story and I'm giving it to you as an extra bonus here. It's the grandfather she writes about and the now well-known to you and me, deservedly and heavily check-marked "Tweety."
Happy birthday, Christina!
(By the way, when Christina went on to become Editor In Chief of two other publications, she edited in a much more calming purple pen.)
I love these behind the scenes glimpses into how Sassy worked. Thank you for showing us your magic.
I had two editors at two different times in my career — at a small newspaper and at the newsletter for a major hospital system in Chicago —use this very effective editors note: “hunh?” when confronted with a sentence that didn’t quite land. So helpful. Truly. You could hear the exasperation of those consonants running into one another. Another favorite editor would write out in black ink, in his perfect print , compliments and suggestions at the bottom
of a print out of my feature stories and “what’s workings” for the PR Intelligence Report newsletter, reserving the red pen for copy edits. (Reader, I married him). I owe my Washington Post Magazine fun and success to the excellent editor David Rowell, who typed the kindest and funniest notes on Washington Post notebook paper that he included with my copies of the magazine. I absolutely struggle with “track changes” changes because just like Slack the app, it does the opposite of what it promises.
Now, about that birthday corsage, Christine.