Back in late 2007, when I was still a slave to newspaper deadlines, I got worked up about a thrashing delivered to New York Times Magazine writer Deborah Solomon by the paper’s hired dean of conformity, Public Editor Clark Hoyt.

Solomon was pilloried by Hoyt for doing what the paper, through its unwritten code of deadlines and story length limits, forces writers to do: Namely, shorten everything, including direct quotations, and re-arrange them for dramatic effect and logical continuity.

I and many other writers do this all the time: We condense, we delete, we re-arrange direct quotations.

Horrors!

He admits that in writing?

You betcha.

Continued – Solomon’s crime, as near as I can figure, was trying to make her writing conform to two opposing demands by her paper. First, she is required to be pithy, interesting and brief. Second, she must interview her question-and-answer subjects at length, so as to mine those pithy, interesting remarks which she must then somehow condense into the very few lines allotted to her in the Times magazine’s tightly controlled news-space budget. She must take what might add up to hours of audio-recorded conversations complete with ands, buts, ums, ers and ahs, plus the odd cell phone ring, clinking of silverware and background noise if the interview is conducted over lunch with a drawn-out argument over who gets the check; then she must sift through all the verbiage for the pithy, interesting parts, try to massage some grammar into them while keeping the meaning, then compress it all into the tiny space her editors choose to allot her. It’s a lot of work, folks, and it takes a lot of sifting and compressing.

Now I want to say right here that it’s not right, fair or honest to misconstrue someone’s remarks. It is an immutable rule that we never quote someone in a way that inaccurately reflects what our source said.

But apparently Solomon ran afoul of interview subjects who got mad because not every wise mot they spoke showed up in the Q & A she wrote. Moreover, and this was perceived as a great sin in her case, the writer of the Q & A piece might actually include a question he or she failed to ask during the interview.

My God! What a terribly dishonest thing to do!

Well, no. I did it now and then when I wrote my Detroit Free Press Five Q & A pieces. What if you interview someone and he or she start talking about something you didn’t think to ask that person about? Later, while writing, you think, Hey, that was interesting. But this is a Q & A. It’s so rigidly formatted that you can’t just plop somebody’s statement in there without the required question. In normal writing, you could, but in the tight Q & A, the subject’s remark has to be construed as the answer to a question, and if that is so, well, it better be preceded by a question. But you didn’t ask the question, and in Solomon’s case, it’s not on her recording. So what do you do? No question, so don’t use the remark? Simple: Figure out the question that would have provoked the subject’s statement as an answer if it had been an answer to a question, which we know it was not. In short, you make up the question, which is, strictly speaking, fiction, so that the answer, which is strictly speaking fact, can follow naturally.

Dishonest? No. So long as the statement conforms to the subject’s meaning, it’s legitimate. The question is not more made up than the Q & A format. Sure, you could ban this practice of backing into questions. The effect would be Q & A essays that are less interesting. The reader would lose. If the quotation is correctly stated, nobody is hurt.

What we have, then, is a writer (actually writers, plural, because Deborah Solomon was not and is not the Lone Ranger in this practice) trying to please readers and editors, at the same time cramming as much information and pith into a short space as she can so she can go home and have a life.

Here’s what it comes down to: Anyone, and this includes editors as well as the public, who thinks these newspaper Q & A pieces are verbatim interview transcripts needs a quick trip back to first grade for a short course in reading.

Contact me at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com