on editing

or, a note to young writers

I came across an interesting sentiment here on substack this morning. I already made a response, but I’d like to unpack it further.

This isn’t meant as a criticism of

John Coon

. I don’t know him! But I’m sure he’s a perfectly fine person and editor. And there are numerous reasons why he may have said what he said the way he said it when he said it, but I do think it exemplifies a very specific kind of approach to literature, or at least how we speak about literature online.

So I’m going to somewhat tediously go through this post, not to criticize John, but to speak more broadly about the editorial process.

the obligatory referencing of my credentials

I have been a published author since I was twenty. I’ve had a few novels come out through small independent presses. I’ve selfpublished a decent amount. I’ve also had a novel out through a mid-size traditional publisher in the UK. In all cases, I’ve had to deal with editors, including ones whose professions are Editor.

I’ve also had dozens of short stories and essays published over the last almost-twenty years. At two separate occasions, I had a weekly column at magazines (neither exist anymore, sadly) where I was edited weekly. I’ve had stories in major magazines and anthologies, with my stories coming out in venues or even in the same issue as big name professional authors. I’ve even had a short story of mine singled out by Tor.com as one of the best stories to come out in a given month. I’ve also been published for free at places where the editing was done by a volunteer. Places that have come and gone, disappeared from the internet.

So I’ve been edited a lot and by a lot of different people and by people with various skill levels, credentials, successes, and at varying timelines.

I was also a freelance editor for a few years. In that time, I edited dozens of novels and nonfiction books.

In every single situation where I’ve been edited, I have personally felt a lot of social and professional pressure to agree with edits. This pressure wasn’t necessarily pushed upon me by anyone else. But when you’re twenty and a real life adult with decades of experience gives you feedback, it felt to me like I had to agree to edits. And so too often I swallowed my own feelings about a piece and went along with edits, even when I disagreed.

However, as you get more experience being edited (and editing), you gain the confidence to push back.

outlining the credentials of would-be editors

I’ve spoken about this in other places, but the only thing that qualifies many people as a publisher or editor is that they bought a webpage domain and set up an email where people can send them stories or essays.

Literally, that’s it!

Theres a wide range of who and what an editor is, but many editors are simply people who have decided to be involved in the publishing process. If they work for a major press or magazine, they had to prove that they can do the job and go through some kind of hiring process. But if they’re in the independent world, their credentials may just be that they own a website with Magazine or Press in the title.

This is partly what makes publishing a numbers game. In every case, whether you’re dealing with one of the Big Five or a one-person operation, you’re being judged by a single person’s specific tastes and biases. A rejection from this person may feel devastating, but the next person you send it to may love your story or essay.

This is a reminder not to take your wins or losses in publications too seriously. Why you appeal to one person and not another has nothing to do with a meritocracy and may have nothing to do with your skill as a writer. Ultimately, it’s just about that one person’s taste.

That’s not to denigrate editors, but to contextualize who they are and what they do. They are the arbiters of what gets published, but they’re far from an objective judgment of quality.

I could point to dozens of infamous stories of books that were rejected a hundred times before going on to win major awards or becoming generational bestsellers.

the editing process

You should expect for there to be some amount of back and forth during the editing process. This is normal. More than that, this is a healthy and productive way for the process to go.

That doesn’t mean it’s without contention. As the editor or writer, you may feel personally attacked during this process. You may get angry or feel misunderstood. You may yell or even write in all caps to try to get your point across. You may, against your better judgment and despite your attempts at professionalism, insult one another or imply that the other is a fucking idiot who can’t read.

This all feels wretched in the moment and it may not be worth it, but it can lead to the improvement of the text.

And that’s what this is really for.

Any editor who balks at edits being rejected or argued over is either too inexperienced or too egotistical to do their job properly.

Many people will swallow their pride or even their potential better judgment just to get along or to move the process forward. There’s professional pressure here to seem like a team player. To be easy to work with. After all, you don’t want editors and writers to begin whispering about how difficult you are or how much they dislike working with you, yeah? That has the very real potential to severely limit your professional opportunities.

Maybe it shouldn’t! But writing is a very particular industry and who you know and how you feel about them, how they feel about you, are often more important than your talent or skill.

I’ll say it again because it bears repeating: any editor who reacts poorly to pushback on their feedback is too inexperienced to do the job properly.

Because pushback is normal. Not only normal, but mundane. If what you’re talking about is simply grammatical, it’s normal to expect much less pushback (assuming you’re correct! always a perilous assumption in English). But sometimes a writer’s style pushes on grammar or is even actively anti-grammatical in certain cases.

Sometimes there are good reasons for breaking grammar rules and sometimes their are bad ones, but don’t expect deleting a comma to go without notice!

When I worked with the mid-size traditional publisher, we were working on a syntactically experimental work. I was grateful that my editor understood what I was doing! But one of the stylistic quirks of this book had to do with how I was using the comma. Which is to say I was using it idiosyncratically or in anti-grammatical ways.

There was pushback and debate over some of these choices. Sometimes my editor was able to convince me that he was correct and sometimes he wasn’t. But in every case where I agreed with him, I saw how his edit was making my style more itself.

Now, every editor would like to believe themselves Gordon Lish, rewriting Raymond Carver and turning good stories into best-of-the-century stories. But most editors are not that.

And honestly, if Gordon Lish was my editor, I probably would have had a big problem with how invasive his edits were.

who does a story belong to?

Well, the writer.

Always and forever, it’s the writer’s name on the byline.

This means that the writer is the one with the last say on what happens to their story.

Whether the editor likes it or not, the author is the one with the final say.

Of course, it’s your right as an editor to reject a story after acceptance if you and the author can’t find a way to get through the editorial process together.

This is why, knowing myself, I would have really struggled with an editor like Lish. What Lish did with many writers, and most famously with Carver, is change the story so entirely from what the writer had done that it really stopped being Carver’s story. Sure, his name appears there next to What we talk about when we talk about love, but is that story really his anymore?

Given what we know about how Lish essentially rewrote that story, I’d argue that it’s not. Not really. It would make more sense, if we’re being honest, to make Lish a cowriter on the story.

As I said above, I’ve been edited a lot by a lot of different people. Some are those people who just started a website and began accepting submissions and others were people whose profession was editing. They got a paycheck every two weeks from a company where they had a desk and their only responsibility was to edit the stories and novels of people like me.

Some of my worst experiences have been with professionals and some of my best have been with those people without credentials. One of the best editors I ever had was a volunteer. I still remember it so I’m going to mention the process here in a bit more detail.

The story was only 1,300 words. He didn’t give me a single line edit in his first email. Instead, he said, “Make this 900 words.”

I cannot fully express to you how much better this single editorial suggestion improved me as a writer. I don’t just mean that it improved this single story. I mean it fundamentally made me a far better writer.

Because he didn’t tell me what to cut or how to shorten it, I spent an entire day going through that story sentence by sentence. If I could save a sentence by cutting just a single word, I did it. If I could save a paragraph by preserving only one out of five sentences, I did it.

It caused me to focus on syntax and word choice and word order in a way I never had before. In many ways, it taught me how to actually write.

After I got the story down to 900 words, we had a few more edits here and there, but mostly just tightening up grammar.

And seventeen years later, I still think about that experience.

That editor, Richard Thomas, has gone on to have more success as an author and editor. But back then, he was just some guy who volunteered to edit a monthly magazine.

Just last year, I had a story come out in an anthology where the editing process began feeling absolutely bizarre to me. It got to the point where I nearly withdrew my story.

In my view, the editors didn’t even seem to understand the story. Their edits made no sense to me, or seemed in direct opposition to the goals of the narrative.

Over the weeks of back and forth, I agreed to some edits, especially ones about grammar or word order choice, but defended the choices that I believed were most crucial to the story. I wrote paragraphs defending my choices. Defending my story. I tried to be as professional as possible even though every email made me angrier and more baffled by the editorial decisions.

In the end, I got what I wanted. My story remained itself.

And I say this because the story is mine. It doesn’t belong to the editor. It’s not their name in the byline.

It’s mine.

Because of that, I fought to keep it mine.

And, yes, the stakes couldn’t be lower. After all, it’s just a story that probably fewer than a hundred people even read. I got paid a nice amount for it, but I have no illusions about its reach.

But I was also comfortable refusing the money and withdrawing my story from the anthology. I would rather not be published than have my story become something I’m no longer proud of.

In a recent episode of my short story podcast, I discussed how I would have taken this story I thought was very unsuccessful and turned it into a much better story. This kind of exercise is slightly useless but it’s also exactly what I’m talking about with editing. Had I been the editor of this story, I would have recommended a pretty drastic rewrite.

Which would my right to do as an editor. But it would be completely reasonable for the author to simply say, “Had I wanted to tell the story that way, I would have.”

From there, we’d either work it out one way or another. But my goal as the editor of this story would have been to make it more itself. To enhance what’s already there in hopes of making it hit harder, hit in a more profound way, while remaining true to the author’s vision.

Because no matter what you might think as the editor, the story will forever belong to the writer.

As an editor, I may feel that the author is being “insecure and arrogant” for not receiving my edits with grace and gratitude. But as the author, I’d view this editor as someone who is possibly unwilling to see from my perspective. I mean, I could say the exact same thing! I would potentially view this editor as insecure and arrogant, believing that they know better than me about what’s right for my story.

what’s to be done then?

This is art we’re talking about. Which is to say: this is all subjective.

Because of this, it can be difficult to view ourselves as purely subjective. Especially when our job is Editor or Writer. Both titles come with a certain level of arrogance and self-importance.

No one would submit a story for publication without the arrogance and ego and self-importance to believe that their words matter so much that someone else should read them. No one would choose to edit a story without the arrogance and ego and self-importance to believe they know what is good and bad art.

This is also why the process can be so contentious. You put two egos in opposition to one another and see which one blinks first.

For the editorial process to work at all, you need that ego. But you also—both writer and editor—need enough humility and grace to see the other’s perspective.

And for all that I’ve said, if we talk about power imbalance, the editor is the one in the driver’s seat here. They get to choose if your story is published or not. Because writers are so used to failure and rejection, some will bend over backwards to agree with edits even if they don’t like the edits. Their insecurity gets the better of them and they assume that the editor’s authority is based on something substantial, rather than seeing the editor as just another subjective agent in this dance of artistry.

And I am fully aware of how annoying writers are. I know a lot of writers! I’m only friends with a few. The number of writers I like as people and the number of writers I know is a very wide margin! So trust me, I understand when editors want to complain about writers. I understand how frustrating and stupid and full of shit writers are.

But I’ve also worked with enough editors to know that they’re not that different. Often, they’re all coming from the same pool of people. After all, many editors are just writers wearing a different hat.

But if you want to make a go of being a successful writer or editor, you need humility. You need to be willing to compromise. As an editor, you also need to understand that the story doesn’t belong to you. As a writer, you need to understand that this person may be able to make your story better. But you also need to trust yourself enough to know when the editorial suggestions are wrong for your story.

And sadly for all you editors or would-be editors: the story belongs to the writer and they have to have the final say on what happens to their story.