What I Learned From Blue Pencils About Disappearing
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The real work of editing happens in blue: the messy, invisible layer of questions and shifts that makes the final red checkmark possible and powerful. Welcome to What I Learned From… “Of course it takes skill to be a poet! But an editor? A pair of shears, a blue pencil, and a paste-pot!” — Alice Corbin Henderson What I Learned From …When you say “editing”, most people picture harsh red slashes marching across a page. But there is another color in the story, the one that does its job and then disappears: blue. The magic was chemical. The orthochromatic film used for making printing plates was blind to a specific, pale shade of cyan. This wasn't an aesthetic choice, it was a brilliant hack. Draftsmen and editors could scribble instructions like crop lines, arrows, and layout sketches directly onto the artwork. Then they’d send it to the plate room and watch the blue vanish like a ghost in the machine. The most important marks were designed to be invisible. Artists and typographers loved the pencils for practical reasons, but they kept it for a psychological one. Non-photo blue is a permission slip. It says: make a mess you do not have to defend in public. Even in digital workflows, where scanners will happily pick up that pale cyan, a quick grayscale shift or channel swap sends it packing. Editors had their own blue long before anyone talked about RGB. Two-color checking pencils were standard kit, red on one end and blue on the other. Houses varied on the rules, but the vibe was consistent. Blue was the voice of conversation…the question, the suggestion, the structural shift that shapes the work before anyone declares it. This power to make things disappear even gave the tool its own verb: to blue-pencil something was to cut it, or in some contexts, to censor it. This darker lineage isn't a detour; it's the same principle viewed from the other side. It reveals an essential tension: what belongs in the public eye, and what must be removed before the work can stand? The habit shows up outside publishing, too. Conductors and music librarians often annotate scores in paired colors so the conductor’s private cues live in one color while notes that travel to the orchestra live in another. Blue keeps the rehearsal brain on the stand while red goes to the players. Different stage, but the same idea. And of course we all know about blueprints. When I designed the CYC logo, I had this lineage in my hands without really knowing about it. I knew I wanted an editing mark. I knew I wanted red. I knew I wanted it clean. So I paged through proofreader guides until I found it: the "stet" or the checkmark, a tidy little "yes" placed beside a line that just works. I toned the red so it did not shout like the teacher’s pen that makes your stomach clench, and I kept the shape sparse. Editing is a partnership, and a small mark says you might want to review this or “Hey, you’ve done something great here!” The blue pencil's private work makes the shared red mark possible, and it does its job well…it lets the writing shine. Which is why I’m not actually worried that CYC is red forward, cause that’s the point. The brand shows you the line I’m willing to keep. It earns its disappearance. You don’t need to hunt for it, you should only feel its absence if I skip it. This week my desk looks like the inside of that blue layer. Redirect maps have tiny arrows marching from old doors to new ones. Post-it notes up the walls are doing roll calls. I am smoothing joins you will never notice and wiring emails you will never think about—until they arrive right when you need them. (Fingers crossed!) There is a checklist to catch the pebbles before they become an avalanche, which is how pebbles behave when there are a zillion of them at the top of a mountain you are climbing up (often without a safety-line.) None of that will show up in a glossy announcement. And it shouldn’t. Invisible structure is still structure. Outlines, beats, margin notes, index cards that live three feet from the keyboard, the copywork that teaches your hand what a true stroke feels like, even the rest week you schedule so the piece can breathe while you step away. Blue is permission to be wrong on purpose until you are right on purpose. Red is the confidence to sign your name to it. So I’ll keep a pale pencil nearby for the reminder as much as the mark. Sketch the thinking where only I will see it…until the world sees it in brooding atrament and saturated deep bold red (apparently the next closest red color to the new hex code, which has no name but is also adjacent to “Blood Omen” so yikes!) When the page goes to print, the blue will vanish and the red will stay…a single quiet “yes” that carries all the weight of what we chose not to show. And if next week’s WILF reads clean, now you know why. Previously in This Writing Life …All the good stuff you were meant to see but probably didn’t.
Worth Reading …The pieces that made me pause last week.
Notes from the Masters …Craft advice that holds up, straight from the ones who lived it. “The last piece of advice is to keep a paper and pencil in your pocket at all times, especially if you’re a poet. But even if you’re a prose writer, you have to write things down when they come to you, or you lose them, and they’re gone forever. Of course, most of them are stupid, so it doesn’t matter. But in case they’re the thing that solves the problem for the story or the poem or whatever, you’d better keep a pencil and a paper in your pocket. I gave this big advice in a talk, and then about three hours later I told a student I really liked his work and asked how I could get in touch with him. He said he would give me his name and address. I looked in my pocket, and I didn’t have any pencil or paper.” ― Grace Paley Prompted: Your Move …A spark from this week’s essay. Use it to write your own. Write a first draft entirely in blue pencil (or pen or marker or whatever you have on hand.) Give yourself full permission to be messy, illogical, and wrong. Use brackets for unsure ideas, ALL CAPS for notes to yourself, and arrows for structural shifts. Glossary of The Forgotten …Because life’s too chaotic for bland words. Rescribe [ree-SKRIBE] (v.) — To write again. Drawn from Latin rescribere (re “again” + scribere “to write”), it carried the weight of an official or formal reply in its earliest uses, but by the 17th century, it named the deep, physical labor of writing something anew. This isn't a light edit or a tweak; it is the act of setting the old text aside and starting fresh on the parchment, often by hand. You feel the scribery of it. It's more than its breezier cousin rewrite, which softened and democratized the action, losing the sense of skilled recrafting. Sorta synonyms: rework, recast, transform Use it for: blue-pencil edits, the monk patiently illuminating a manuscript for a second time, the brand rebuilt from the inside out Want to read more in-depth Glossary entries? Catch up on the archives and find this week’s newest one. Try This Thing …No promises. Just a potentially brilliant shortcut or two. Read-o-meter is a free tool that gives you more than just a word count. Drop in your draft and get sentence and paragraph stats, character count, and a quick estimated reading time (because of course that’s what a Read-o-meter does.) The Final Chuckle …Serious writing deserves unserious endings. Everyone’s a critic. ‘Til next time ~ Elisa PS - Get ready! The doors are opening soon. (And the hinges are well-oiled, thanks to all my invisible blue-pencil work.) |