I wrote nine hundred words about a sound editor in March. Real words — what she actually did, which was a specific and difficult thing involving the way a room sounds when someone stops talking in it, and how she had learned it, and the two films where you can hear her thinking.
It ran because she had died.
I have been at this for fourteen years and that is the part I have finally stopped being able to shrug about. The obituary is the last place in this business with room for craft. Not the profile, which needs a hook and a release date. Not the review, which is about the film. Not the trade piece, which is about money. The obituary is the only form left where an editor can say yes to nine hundred words on a person almost no reader has heard of doing work almost no reader can name, and the reason it is permitted is that the person is beyond benefiting from it.
There is a version of me from about 2015 that would have written this as an attack on editors, and that version was wrong, so let me put the counterweight properly. Nothing about this is anybody's malice. The obituary is exempt from the pitch process because it is not competing for the same slot; it arrives with its own occasion attached, which is exactly what a features editor needs and cannot manufacture. And obituaries have always been the venue for summing a life up — that is not a decline, that is the form working. There are also genuinely good craft publications. They are small, and they are not where the readers are, and their existence is regularly used to close this conversation rather than to open it.
Still: the shape is the shape. In California a person can spend thirty-one years being the best in the world at something and receive one serious piece of writing about it, and receive it posthumously, and the profession that failed to write it earlier will describe the piece as a tribute.
So about two years ago I started writing them early.
Not obituaries — I am not sending anyone their own death notice. The obituary's form, which is the actual thing I wanted: no news peg, no release to hang it on, no quotes from the star, the whole piece organised around what the person can do rather than around what is happening this month. I pitch them as profiles and they are structurally obituaries with the tense changed, and about a third of them run.
The first one I did that way was a gaffer, and after it ran he sent me an email that said he had shown it to his father, who had never understood what he did for a living. That is the entire return on the exercise and it is enough.
I do not know whether this scales, and I suspect it does not, because the reason the form is permitted after a death is the occasion, and an editor can only be talked past that so many times before it becomes a favour I am spending. What I know is that the sound editor's family read the March piece at the service, and that somebody there told me it was lovely, and that I had had the notes for it in a file since 2019 and had not been able to sell it once.
