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PENI GRIFFIN

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Year-End Wrap-Ups
Dec03 Editors... They Ain't Want You Want, They're What You Need
Nov03 The Secret Formula for Originality - Revealed!
Oct03 An Incoherent Message Concerning Narrative Structure; or 'Reality. What a concept.'
Sep03 Preaching to the Choir
Aug03 FanFic

on ACHUKACHAT, the website discussion board...

Editors... They Ain't Want You Want, They're What You Need
by Peni Griffin

Concerning Editors and Editing

That this advantage is often ignored by users of the internet is unfortunate. A lot of grief and boredom could be avoided if we would all wait 24 hours and re-read the post before sending a flame; and a certain amount of time could be saved just by checking spelling, grammar, clarity, and felicity of expression before hitting "send."

In high school, I was an editor for the yearly magazine. I knew, more or less, what an editor did, and I did my best to do this job. The results were unfortunate, since the other students assumed that my sole function was to accept or reject submissions. When I said "This could be better" and suggested improvements, the submitter vanished without a trace (if from outside the creative writing class) or fought me tooth and nail (if from inside it), accusing me of nasty personal traits.

I do not rule out the possibility that my editorial input could sometimes have been better worded. My preference for editing my conversations has a sound basis in experience. However, we judge others by ourselves, and my own desire was to put only the best possible work before our reading public, such as it was. Readers are not kind; they are not generous; they neither know nor care about the author's feelings. Therefore, it is necessary for the author not to have feelings; or, if this is impossible, to detach himself from them during the process of preparing the material.

The writer does not matter. The work does.

At this point some of you are protesting: "But so-and-so doesn't/didn't revise!" I suggest that you look over the biography and output of so-and-so carefully. One of two things will be true; either so-and-so's work leaves a lot to be desired, or the author is doing the revision at an unexpected stage of the process.

Take the case of Walter B. Gibson. You may not know who he is, but the Shadow does. In addition to 283 Shadow novels under the house name of Maxwell Grant, Gibson wrote 187 other books, 668 articles, 48 syndicated feature columns, various comic scripts, etc. During the most mind-boggling stage of his mind-boggling career, Gibson was responsible for turning out two full-length Shadow novels per month. Gibson did not have time to work through numerous drafts - what came out of his typewriter had to be essentially ready for the editor's desk and publication with minimal alteration.

So he wrote all the time. He did nothing else. When his hands were still, his brain was busy. He wrote at parties. His son fell asleep to the sound of typing in the next room. With his entire life focused on producing perfect copy, any time, all the time, Walter B. Gibson reached a stage at which, by the time he sat down, he was essentially taking dictation of a finished story from himself.

Few can do this; and those who do, have earned it. They've put in their time at the rough draft. They've written their crud, and discarded it, and written some more. It becomes second nature, as easy as dancing to Gene Kelly, as basketball to Michael Jordan, as running to Secretariat.

Okay, so there was never a human Secretariat in any endeavor.

The point is that those people who expect to write the best words they can write the first time they write them are fooling themselves.

Even those, like me, without the stamina or inclination to reach a Gibsonian level of literary athleticism can learn tricks to shorten the process. You must learn your own faults and virtues without getting hung up on them, get a feel for how long a work needs to cool off between draft and revision, and predict the reactions of readers. The gardening analogy is inescapable. Just as you tailor your garden to the size of the lot, the alkalinity of the soil, and the local rainfall, you tailor your book not only to your strengths but to your weaknesses and to the requirements of the market and audience.

Few of us can do this all on our own. We need an outsider - an editor. Yes, need, as in can't do without.

And this is where the professionals get separated from the talented amateurs; because hostility between amateurs and editors is endemic.

Among the creative, a certain level of paranoia is natural given the way we are treated in daily life. Consider the attitude of Charles, one of the protagonists of Elaine Marie Alphin's brilliant novel delineating the interior life of the creative teen, Simon Says (Harcourt 2002).

He identifies himself so closely with his art, and has been rejected through his art so often, that he cannot bring himself to trust Rachel, the editor of the arts magnet high school's magazine:

The real Rachel wants to see inside of me and rearrange the pieces, and that's different from what I do - I arrange the pieces in my sketches so other people can see the pattern. Rearranging pieces is more like forcing your pattern on someone else.

I don't want her to take me apart and reassemble me so the best pieces fit neatly and the others are discarded and the new Charles Weston she has created is forgiven...She'll find some tidy way to delete the guilt, the pain, and bring out my potential in a polished new version of me...

It's not an easy job and not just anyone can do it. Editors don't, after all, have access to the shining perfect work inside your head; they don't know what you're saying, so they can't tell you how to say it. They can't do the revision for you, or more than suggest what some of your cardinal flaws and virtues are. But if all they did was accept or reject what was sent to them, our library shelves would be much the poorer.

At bare minimum, an editor must be able to make an honest, perceptive reader's response. She hones in on confusing elements, redundancies, and other technical flaws which a more casual reader would perceive without necessarily being able to pinpoint. When you know what you want to say, it is fatally easy to believe that you have said it when you have not. Conversely, you may take the speechwriter's advice (Tell ‘em what you're going to say; say it; tell ‘em what you said) too much to heart and over-explain. This is a particularly delicate matter for those in the juvenile/YA field, since it is hard for most grownups to remember their previous mental states well enough to judge when they're being obscure and when they're being obvious. A second opinion on such matters is vital, and your own kids are not typically a good source. After all, your kids are smarter than other people's - and they've been interpreting your meanings their entire lives, an advantage the children of strangers lack.

Many people like to rely on critique groups and first readers to assist in the revision chores; and this is legitimate. Other writers frequently make excellent editors, and an articulate first reader can represent the intended public, if chosen well. It's that choosing well which is problematic. You need readers who aren't afraid to hurt your feelings but don't have any ego involved in showing you up; who can express their responses in a useful way; and who don't want to "rearrange the pattern" into their own image. If you find such readers, more power to you

But critique groups don't have the inside line on the market, don't know what competing works are in the pipeline, and are not career literary midwives. They cannot fight for you in committee and their future with the publisher does not depend on the quality of your work. The road to publication is paved by professional editors.

These editors are squashed between the cold, hard corporation on one side and the warm, squishy author on the other, while doing her own faxing, reading mountains of manuscripts, and tracking trends. The glimpses I've had into the editorial life combined with my own experience in office work give me considerable sympathy for them. On one side, corporate offices are nasty, politic-ridden places. On the other, writers are flaky by nature and touchy by socialization. But an editor who loves your work will cope with all that, for the work's sake. I've been blessed with good editors at every turn, and have nothing bad to say about anyone who ever asked me to rewrite a scene.

The only criticism I can make of editors, as a class, is that they display a certain lack of biodiversity. I don't remember ever meeting a non-white editor, and most of those I have met are upper-middle-class white women educated in the northeastern U.S. Since we all think of the way we live as normal and the ways others live as strange or exotic, the literature of people who are not upper-middle-class northeastern whites has tended to suffer dilution passing through this editorial filter into the American public. This is part and parcel of an overall tendency for self-perpetuating elites to dominate fields. As in the sciences, and politics, and teaching, and what-have-you, the problems associated with this tendency will fade away as more different kinds of people take more different jobs, a trend which has been gradually underway throughout my life and which I hope to see ascendant before I die.

In the meantime, you will be submitting your manuscripts to an individual editor, not to a statistical mass, and it may be that the individual you deal with is innocent of the ills of society; or at least as innocent as you are. All generalities are untrue at the individual level, and it's counterproductive to enter the relationship with the prejudice that your editor will be prejudiced. Many are not; or at least not in ways that interfere with your particular work; or vary significantly from the perceived norm; or, if prejudiced, are readily educable. Do unto her as you would have her do unto you, and deal with her, not her class, race, or gender.

One rampant prejudice is absolutely unwarranted. No editor, not one, is interested in "stealing your idea." What would she do with it, after all? Ideas are easy and the odds are poor that your bare premise is new to any editor with enough reading experience to get hired. You do not have to put a copyright notice on you manuscript - the editor knows that your words belong to you as soon as you write them, under American law. Yet I have seen newsgroup discussions of how to evade this non-existent danger go on for weeks after any professionals in the vicinity have given up trying to introduce a level of reality to the paranoid atmosphere.

These discussions are so tedious, so persistent, and so impervious to reason that I suspect that fear of intellectual theft is a cover for more personal, reasonable fears. After all, if editors are untrustworthy thieves, no one need blame himself for not putting his brilliance to the test of submission.

Submission, especially to faceless editors whom one has never met, is frightening, frustrating, and discouraging. Too many manuscripts lie around in the offices of too few publishers, and any given submission is far more likely to be rejected than accepted. The worst possible fate at this stage is that your manuscript will be lost, unread, in the mountains of paper. This is a function of inefficient office procedures, inadequate staffing, over-submission, and human error. It is not something the editor does on purpose, not even those who are worst about it.

Of course bad editors exist, just like bad roofers and bad artists. Occasionally one hears an authentic horror story about an editor who fulfills Charles's expectations and attempts to make over a book in her own image. This is especially traumatic if she doesn't know what she's doing - rewriting your verse so that it no longer scans, "correcting" paragraphs so that what was clear is now confusing, forcing a political or social point of view onto the material, etc. I'm happy to say that this is far from the norm. More common is the "orphaning" of books when an editor changes houses, or departments, or retires. Her successor might be compatible, or she might not; she will almost certainly be more involved with books she discovered herself than with those she inherited. This doesn't make her bad, but it isn't good for her inherited clients.

But the worst editor is the one who only accepts or rejects; who is too lazy, too respectful, or too indifferent to attempt to drag your best work out of you. If you're not Walter B. Gibson (and you're not), avoid this editor for your own good.

Not every editor can work with every writer. But it's up to the writer to develop sufficient maturity to enable some editor, somewhere, to work with her.

To assure yourself that I'm not making it up about Gibson, read his biography, a not particularly well-written work which benefits from enthusiasm and access to the subject's papers: Walter B. Gibson and the Shadow by Thomas J. Shimeld (McFarland & Co., 2003)

Or go straight to the personal reminiscences and extensive quotes at Walter B. Gibson - Wizard of Words.

DECEMBER 2003 © Peni Griffin

Editor: Michael Thorn
Contact: 07803605045 or email
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