Magazine writers are, for the most part, serial obsessives. We’re talking here about the good ones, like the celebrated breed you see listed on our masthead on page 16. What they do is this: they hook into a subject and stay hungry on the story, piling up detail and illuminating color to the point where they’re almost sick of it. This can take a month or many months. (Some stories, like Nick Tosches’s brilliant 1997 piece on HollywoodVegas strongman Sidney Korshak, take a full year to complete.) The narrative of the story tends to gestate during the reporting period and then, through varyingly painful bouts of creative agony, the writer produces reams of fabulous copy which Vanity Fair’s extraordinary, under-celebrated tribe of editors, also listed on page 16, then make even better. (I have a theory, by the way, about writers who say they love writing. The pleasure they get from it is almost always in inverse relation to the pleasure of the reader at the other end. Good writing—that is to say, writing that others might enjoy—is hard. It’s bad writing that’s easy and fun.)

With photographers, like the super-celebrated breed listed on page 16, the obsessive periods become even shorter. And here again the great ones work hard to make it look easy. Any nitwit can take a good picture once. To go out day after day and turn in memorable images on demand is more than an art; it’s killing, nerve-racking work. For the photographers, the stress sometimes lasts an intense few hours, or, when the subject is uncooperative, a few heart-pounding minutes.

By now, you probably realize that “serial obsessive” is code for “short attention span.” And editors are the worst of the lot. For some reason, I can tell you off the top of my head the year and month of most of the memorable magazine articles I’ve read in other magazines. But I have trouble remembering what was in the December issue of this magazine. I’m serious. I can barely remember what I said in the last sentence.

The serial-obsessive part takes over the moment the writer turns the story in. V.F.’s team of under-appreciated fact checkers (see page 16) go to work and basically re-report the story in reverse. When that’s done, the copy department, whose chief just celebrated a very important birthday—I’ll let him tell you which one—turns the whole ungainly tangle of edits, corrections, and queries into seamless prose. About this time, the writer, tanned and buff from a mid-aftemoon workout, swans into the office ready to tackle his next obsession. And here is where the really under-appreciated editor in chief comes in. It’s the job of the person at the top of the masthead to make the writer feel that the next story, like the one before it, is simply the most important thing that he or she will ever do; that the editor’s livelihood and the well-being of his children are at stake; that ending his career at Modern Podiatry is a very definite possibility unless the next story is great, the writer gets it in on time, and it is double-spaced.

Check out three stories in this issue about true long-term obsessives. On page 96, senior editor Ned Zeman has written a remarkable piece about Bruno Zehnder, a photographer whose obsession ultimately led to his death. Zehnder spent much of his adult life in the Antarctic, photographing emperor penguins. He was to them what, say, Ansel Adams was to mountains or Helmut Newton is to gorgeous naked women. Then there is Jacqueline Susann, the kitsch queen who had a bottomless pang for fame and fortune. And she got both by writing three straight No. 1 best-sellers: Valley of the Dolls, The Love Machine, and Once Is Not Enough. Special correspondent Amy Fine Collins’s delightful story on Susann, whose life has been turned into a soon-to-be-released movie starring Bette Midler, begins on page 114. And then there’s contributing editor Marjorie Williams’s profile on page 110 of Terry McAuliffe, the demon fundraiser for the Democratic Party, whose life mission, it seems, is to make sure that Bill Clinton doesn’t become our first deadbeat president. Bill Clinton—now there’s a serial obsessive for you.