Opinion
David Ignatius

These editor’s notes are poison. I learned from every drop.
Working with Starling Lawrence, who died last month, was a bracing course in a 
vanishing art.

September 16, 2025
10 min



316

Starling Lawrence, editor at W.W. Norton. (Patricia Chui/Courtesy of W.W. 
Norton)
“Ugh.” “Ick.” “Try Again.” “Let’s not.” “No, no, no, no. no, no! If you saw 
this in a movie you’d get up and walk out.”

These were just a few of the comments (and among the milder ones) that Starling 
Lawrence, the great W.W. Norton editor, wrote on drafts of seven of my spy 
novels that he published over the past two decades. People sometimes wonder if 
words really matter these days. Well, they damn well did to Star Lawrence.

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To be edited by Lawrence was a tutorial in the craft of writing, and in my 
case, a reminder of my woeful shortcomings. (He would have put an “X” next to 
woeful and written “trite.”) He died last month at 82, and I want to share with 
readers some of what he taught me about the vanishing art of editing.

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Lawrence was everything a man named “Starling” should be. He was tall, urbane, 
well-dressed. He disdained what he regarded as ordinary, “down-market” writing 
and was passionate about the inventive writers he discovered and cultivated. 
That group included Michael Lewis and Sebastian Junger, two giants of 
nonfiction, and Patrick O’Brian, a writer of 20 addictive sea novels, including 
“Master and Commander.”

My own apprenticeship with Lawrence began with my sixth novel, “Body of Lies.” 
I had published my first book, “Agents of Innocence,” with Norton and had a 
wonderful editor, Linda Healey, but then I wandered among three other 
publishing houses before coming back to Norton, where Lawrence was editor in 
chief.


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Lawrence wanted to break me of bad habits, and the 2006 draft of “Body of Lies” 
is dense with comments written in his tiny cursive with a sharp No. 2 pencil. 
On nearly every page you can see his deletion of empty descriptive words and 
insistence on precise ones.


When I described “faded” curtains early in the manuscript, he wrote: “I always 
detested this word, as I do ‘battered.’ Something specific.” He didn’t like 
overused, “writerly” language, and he hated predictable word choices. When I 
wrote: “A cloud seemed to pass over her face, darkening her features,” Lawrence 
responded: “Something I have often heard & seldom believe.” When I wrote 
“tasty” and “munch” in the same sentence, he scribbled “ugh ugh.” When I 
described a character who “winced,” Lawrence cut it. “Is there another word? 
This one is a stock item. ‘Flinched,’ perhaps.” When I wrote the phrase “in 
truth,” Lawrence penciled it out. “Almost never a useful line.”


Lawrence especially didn’t like sloppy, sexist description, and he could be 
hilarious in savaging it. When I said of a female character, “her hair seemed 
to float in slow motion like one of those women in the Breck shampoo 
commercials,” he penciled tartly: “Probably never good to have your heroine 
remind the hero of a TV commercial.” He drew a wobbly line next to a whole 
passage of male/female dialogue: “I think you’ll have to come up with a 
different dynamic here.” He wrote archly: “This conversation, as my mother 
would say, does not reflect well on either of them.” He wanted images that came 
from real life, not a movie or television drama. When I described a woman 
speaking “cheerily,” he snipped: “Bad word — she sounds like Doris Day.” After 
another dubious descriptive line, he just wrote: “Please!!!”

Lawrence could be profane himself in conversation, but he didn’t like too much 
of it in books and too many F-bombs inevitably got an X. Tough-guy talk didn’t 
impress him. A drink that went down “sharp and cool,” drew the response: “Do 
over … this sounds like Mickey Spillane.” A description of a gin Martini as a 
“liquid hammer” got another “do over.”


Finally, after penciling several hundred pages of these “ughs” and “icks,” 
Lawrence offered me a general admonition about writing: “Beware of the 
Obvious!” he wrote in large letters. “I think it helps to ask whether you are 
giving the reader information he doesn’t have or can’t figure out himself. And 
if it is a description of some sort the question should be: Is this original or 
interesting enough to warrant inclusion? Sometimes cutting beats revising.”


Cut, cut, cut, in other words. Remove anything that is extraneous, fatuous or 
false. That was my first book with Lawrence, and perhaps he realized I might be 
feeling a little bruised. So near the end of the manuscript, he offered a 
gentle suggestion that in my next draft, I emulate his best-selling sea 
novelist:

“Try rewriting with the goal of leaving out everything you possibly can — the 
Patrick O’Brian technique of narration — and if the reader has to scramble a 
bit to understand, that’s okay. I once suggested to POB that a glossary in his 
books would be useful. ‘Oh no,’ he replied. ‘Ignorance of the cross-catharpin 
[a brace for a ship’s mast] is not necessarily fatal. Explanation of it surely 
is.’”

I rewrote “Body of Lies,” cutting everything I could, leaving out the shampoo 
commercial and the faded curtains, and trying to be a less bad writer. Somehow, 
the book became a bestseller and then a Hollywood movie. Lawrence was pleased 
and, I suspect, a bit surprised. He knew the depths from which it had emerged.

After that first encounter, Lawrence was gentler. That was partly because I had 
gotten the lesson and was cutting more of the bad stuff before I submitted the 
first draft. He sent me a letter after receiving my 2011 novel set in Pakistan, 
“Bloodmoney.” “Ate the whole thing in one sitting. … I grieve that my poison 
pencil will have such limited opportunity this time around.”

Still, he had some Xs for that book, too. “Squawking like parrots.” Out. 
“Ringlets of sweat.” Out. “A high, austere forehead.” Out. “Lean and supple.” 
Definitely out. On “Bloodmoney,” I discovered that Lawrence disliked goatees, 
of the sort worn (in draft) by one of my characters. “Goatee has always seemed 
a false note to me … a stage prop … Let’s lose it.”

My book “Quantum Spy” got the lion roaring again. It was a technology story 
about a Chinese American CIA officer, and it opened in a quantum computing lab 
in Seattle. “This sounds more like Power Point than Prologue … heavy on 
exposition at the expense of all other novelistic attributes,” Lawrence wrote 
on the opening page. He thought the book had too many untranslated Chinese 
words. “This can’t go on,” he pleaded in one passage. And too much hackneyed 
writing. A “battered briefcase” prompted this riposte: “Can we not do this? 
Such a cliché of detective novels and manly man fiction.”

Lawrence cringed (rightly) at one offbeat and ultimately villainous female CIA 
character in “Quantum Spy.” His comments rose in a slow boil. “Sounds like a 
Valley Girl!!” “Someone the CIA would weed out on Day 1.” “Enough already!” 
“David please!!” “I am having a credibility attack. Feels like asthma.”

This character is the one that prompted the Lawrence comment I noted at the 
beginning: “If you saw this in a movie you’d get up and walk out. We want your 
book to be a movie — a good one.” As it happened, “Quantum Spy” was optioned 
for a TV series twice, currently by Netflix, which is developing a script that 
maybe, possibly, Lawrence would have liked.

As Lawrence edited my last two books, “The Paladin” and “Phantom Orbit,” our 
relationship was occasionally strained. I ran into structural problems with 
both. But Lawrence didn’t like getting down in the muck with a book that hadn’t 
gelled yet in the author’s mind.

“Structure, shmucksher, what I care about is obsession in the author,” he said 
in a writing class at Princeton, when the teacher, historian Evan Thomas, asked 
how he had managed structural problems in Junger’s classic “The Perfect Storm.” 
Structure mattered less than the fact that “Junger was completely obsessed,” he 
said.

I eventually worked out the problems in “The Paladin” and sent in the 
manuscript. I was rewarded with Lawrence’s acid (but correct) word editing. 
When I described a “spurting fountain,” he wrote: “Not a useful detail. It’s 
what fountains do.” A reference to a character’s “tummy,” drew a complaint. 
“Can we please not overuse this ‘cute’ word.” When I over-described what the 
bad guys were wearing in a decisive final scene, he scolded: “Really not the 
time for sartorial details.”

Lawrence despaired at first with my latest novel, “Phantom Orbit,” a tale of 
space weapons whose storyline jumped in time and place, to his annoyance. The 
manuscript records his usual (and invariably sound) criticisms of lazy writing. 
More worrisome, when I asked what he thought of that first draft, Lawrence was 
almost mute. He obviously didn’t like it, and worse, he wasn’t sure it made 
sense. As it happened, I was calling from a hospital where I was visiting a 
family member, and I wanted good news, but Lawrence couldn’t offer it and 
wouldn’t fake it. That’s part of why he was so good. He wasn’t afraid to be 
honest.

But then Lawrence did what the best editors do, which is to take a risk on his 
writer — and trust him to fix a narrative that isn’t yet working. He gave me 
time and intellectual space to solve my problems. When I sent him the final 
draft, his cover note had just one word: “Bravissimo!” That was one of our last 
exchanges.

Encomiums about editors often describe them as self-effacing people who enable 
their writers. The New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani wrote in reviewing 
the letters of Maxwell Perkins, the celebrated editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 
Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe: “Perkins emerges as a patient, 
long-suffering editor serving as a sort of combination father figure, father 
confessor and cheerleader for his temperamental writer.”

“Do the work. Shut up. Get on with it,” Robert Gottlieb, the brilliant editor 
of John Le Carre, Katharine Graham and many others told Terry Gross on the NPR 
show, “Fresh Air.” Gottlieb told another interviewer, Larissa MacFarquhar in 
the Paris Review: “The glorification of editors … is not a wholesome thing. The 
editor’s relationship to a book should be an invisible thing.”

Starling Lawrence wasn’t invisible. He certainly wasn’t a father confessor. He 
could be sharp as a stiletto with his writers, and he was as needy, in his way, 
as they were. But he was supremely good at what he did. He probably would cut 
that last sentence, but sadly, he can’t.