By Bob Hicks
In his time Mr. Scatter has done a lot of editing, sometimes with the lightest of fingers and sometimes with a bloodied ax.
He has ruthlessly rewritten. Many years ago he was put in charge of “fixing” a writer so bad that he recomposed, and even re-reported, every inch of every story she turned in, begging all the while with his own boss that he please god please do the right thing and fire her so she could become an outstanding tax preparer or short-order cook or anything other than a newspaper reporter, which despite her byline and weekly paycheck she decidedly was not.
Then she took a batch of her rewritten stories, entered them into a prestigious professional competition, and strutted off with a passel of awards. That experience has made Mr. Scatter deeply suspicious of awards ever since. It also played a crucial role in the briefness of his own tenure at that particular less-than-august journal of news and opinion, a place that greeted him on his first day of work with a single rule, banning in-house sexual fraternization: Don’t dip your pen in the company ink. That the prize-winning “writer” was regularly inking and dipping with the publication’s owner did not help Mr. Scatter’s position, although it seemed to do wonders for her own.