Over at Lit Hub I’ve been reading acclaimed editor Terry McDonell’s pieces on the nuances of editing with interest; all of the pieces are adapted from his new book The Accidental Life: An Editor’s Notes on Writing and Writers. Some of the excerpts deal with McDonell’s editorial interactions with famous writers like Jim Harrison, Hunter S. Thompson, and James Salter, but others deal with run-of-the-mill, pedestrian issues like using one’s insomnia to her advantage and negotiating rejection after rejection. Vis-à-vis the latter issue, McDonell writes:
The second-best answer an editor can give a writer is a “fast no.” Most editors are not very good at this and leave writers hanging, sometimes for months. No response is worse, of course, and that’s common, too. The arrogance drives writers crazy with humiliation. Some very good editors don’t care, but the best ones do.
Some editors write thoughtful, useful emails. Most toss off an easily misunderstood line or two, often beginning or ending with how busy the editor is…
A year ago these concerns wouldn’t have been on the forefront of my mind the way they are now, as circa 2016 I would have identified myself solely as a poet. One that wrote the occasional essay, sure, but that’s something that every poet should do, right?
Not discussed by McDonell at all, poetry’s a weird one, as with regards to journals at least; poets rarely get their poems edited by a journal’s poetry editor(s). It’s certainly different for full-length collections, but most of the editing that journal editors engage in revolves around culling down the hundreds and hundreds of submissions to a finite, publishable amount. Editing as collating; editing as curating. I think there’ve only been two times that I’ve been edited by a literary journal’s poetry editor, and in both of those cases the poem was, in my opinion, made worse—although, out of youthful insecurity, I nevertheless agreed to the changes each editor offered me.
But in the past year—maybe eighteen months if I’m being honest—I’ve become, for a variety of reasons, less interested in writing poems and more interested in writing essays. Some of these essays, to be sure, have been about the writing of poems, but others have delved into the loss of musical figures I hold dear or my correspondence with my poetic heroes. And commemorating the twentieth anniversary of The Notorious B.I.G.’s death in relation to Frank O’Hara and other persons of interest, I have an essay collection entitled The Man on High—Essays on skateboarding, hip hop, poetry and The Notorious B.I.G. coming out this fall with the UK press Eyewear.
I state the above not to boast but to elucidate the fact that prior to writing and publishing the above nonfictions, I’d never really been edited, at least not in the way a prose writer is accustomed to being from the get-go. Reading McDonell’s Lit Hub excerpts, then, has solidified in my mind: A) how challenging the process can be for both writers and editors alike and B) how precious as a prose writer I often am with my chosen words.
Since for most of my life prose hasn’t been my chosen vehicle, I—upon a piece’s (joyous!) acceptance for publication—was actually looking forward to being edited. Ready to consider both small and large revision notions, allow the editor a latitude that would be somewhat unthinkable re: my poetic work. The writer that every editor wants to work with, essentially—or at least that’s the way I initially envisioned it.
Didn’t happen, though, of course. One of the things that McDonell notes that I found to be truer-than-true is how busy editors either are or, if you’re being cynical, want to appear to be. With a day turnaround, one editor asked me to substantially revise a 4500-word essay, to the point where the entire contention of the piece was, in my opinion, aggressively lost. Another sent an email stating they had no “active changes,” then included as an attachment the edited version of the essay through their eyes. It was half its original size, each deletion prominently delineated in red with a slash.
The opposite end of the spectrum, however, was equally disconcerting. When a prominent journal, one that my poetry had previously been rejected from a kingly slew of times, accepted an essay of mine, I anticipated a robust editorial process. But beyond two minor copyedits no changes were requested of me whatsoever. I was mildly elated until my prosaic insecurity reared its head. Maybe the piece wasn’t worth making better. Maybe it wasn’t worth spending all that time on, was merely worth publication and then middling oblivion. Such insecurity is my own hang-up, of course, and it’s something I need to work through moving forward, especially because I’m fully aware that each journal is different in terms of hands-on/hands-off editing mores and standards. Each essay, I know, is different as well. Some need a lot of work; others need near none.
Triumphant to woeful, every prose writer has similar editing stories, to be sure. One of the things that McDonell doesn’t note either (at least in the essays excerpted on the Lit Hub website) is the writer-as-editor phenomenon. As a small press author, nearly every editor I’ve encountered is a writer herself, one that has her own literary concerns and idiosyncrasies, foibles and pet peeves. She also has her own writing, and every piece of editing she endeavors to work on takes her away from it. Given the fact that if she is making money it’s no doubt a very small amount, this is a tough position to be in.
To want to be edited, each and every sentence made stronger, and to revile the entirety of the process—this is a transaction that most prose writers negotiated long ago, no doubt, but it’s one that I’m only coming to terms with now, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. I’ll let Terry McDonell have the final thought:
Every writer, of course, has very specific ideas about editors. But writers seldom get the last word on anything.