Writerland is a newsletter from The Delacorte Review whose mission is to help writers tell the stories they need to tell.
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Writers love to complain about editors. Editors are mean. Editors second-guess. Editors undermine and leave writers with self-esteem issues. Never mind that editors can save you from yourself.
Editors know this, in much the same way that parents know that you will behave badly and do dumb things and act in ways that will bring you only the fleeting joy of rebelliousness. Parents, bless their hearts, feel compelled to save us from ourselves. So do editors. In both instances, maybe too much.
I will confess that as a parent – with over thirty years of experience!! – I overdo it, not shutting up when silence is called, trying to help when help is the last thing desired. I do this as an editor too, though admittedly not with the same blunderbuss effect. Perhaps because I am decades past being an overly disciplined child and still very much a writer, I am more sensitive to the impact of my words and deeds as an editor, and can better control my impulse to make things just right. I’m trying kids. I’m trying.
Parents play an outsized role in our lives, and if you don’t believe me ask Sigmund Freud. Editors do, too, and therein lies a problem. Writers may insist they don’t need the approval of their editors but that is as much a lie as telling ourselves we don’t care what mom or dad say. Like young children returning from school with a drawing they hope their folks will display on the fridge, so too do writers bring their stories to editors with much the same desire: do you love it? Say you love it. Please….Editors sometimes forget how much power they wield over writers, for whom failure always feels a story away.
I’ve written for an editor whose first response to a story was, literally, “there are a lot of problems here” even when he liked it. I’ve written for another who, in the course of an edit, reduced me, as an adult who’d written two books mind you, to tears – “what kind of writing is this?” wasn’t the worst of it. But those are the editing equivalents of “Mommie Dearest”. More common is the editor who, like the aforementioned overly involved parent, cannot stop meddling.
I am not referring to content – making sure the facts are correct and supported, that no reporting holes exist, that the lede is not buried, and the point of the story is not lost. Those are as essential – and forgive my overstretching the parental metaphor – as making sure the kids are fed, schooled, healthy, loved, and safe. Rather I am speaking of the writing, of what happens once it is established that the story is accurate, fair, spelled correctly, and presented in a way that is clear and logical.
There is a joke told about editors that goes like this: a writer is lost in the desert and spots a distant oasis. He crawls to the oasis, drops his head in the pool and begins to drink when he hears a tinkling sound. He looks up and sees someone urinating into the pool.
“Who are you?” asks the writer.
“I’m an editor,” responds the micturater.
“What are you doing?” asks the writer.
“Making it better.”
Ah yes, better. There is a fine line between better and making things worse by trying to make them better. The best editors understand this and will walk right up to that line – tweaking infelicitous phrases, smoothing the rough patches, deftly shifting the ordering to heighten the drama, cutting without causing undo pain, excising intrusive verbs like “metamorphose” and replacing it with “transform.”
But I have seen too many editors who convince themselves they are improving the writing by working it and working it and working it like a baker kneading dough. The dough needs it. The writing, not always. Because there comes a point when, well intentioned as that editing may be, the result is to leech the life out of the story. Each successive edit takes the story ever further from the power the writer brought to it, the need to tell it.
I know otherwise fine editors who confess that they cannot bear to leave a story alone. I recognize that this is done in the pursuit of perfection. Worthy as that goal sounds, it is counterproductive when it comes to creativity. The great pianist Vladimir Horowitz was a legendary player of wrong notes. People knew this and while there were quibblers among the cogneseti, most listeners focussed on the beauty of Horowitz’ playing, on the music they heard.
Not all writing voices are beautiful. So what. Not every actor can play Hamlet or Ophelia. Yet as it is with actors deemed too rough around the edges to play romantic leads, some writers will never achieve the elegance in their prose their editors may desire, and mistakenly try to impose.
It is hard to watch children stumble and fall. So too is it hard to let a sentence go when a little trim here and another there will make it…perfect-er. But children need to learn to fall and pick themselves up without mom and dad racing over and saying, let me help. Editors may believe they are improving that vexing sentence. But it comes at a cost; save the sentence, undermine the story, and with it the writer who hears not what may be intended as a reasonable suggestion but only as “not good enough.” Because as with potato chips and salted cashews, it is impossible to stop with just one.
I remind myself as a parent to grant my adult children space. I remind myself as an editor to let writers tell their stories in their voice, lest I screw it up.
Let it go, editor friends. Let it go.
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We wanted to share with you our newest story, a powerful and important piece about the fate of an Iraqi Christian facing deportation: An Iraqi Christian on the Run in America by Amanda Uhle. It appears this week at The Delacorte Review.
Peter Abbo was born in 1969 in Baghdad, a Chaldean, a Catholic minority group in Iraq, where the community has endured an epic list of injustices throughout history. Peter and his family moved to the US in the 1980s. In 2017, he was marked for deportation. He didn’t know Arabic, and he didn’t know anyone in Iraq. As a fair-skinned Chaldean who’d spent decades steeped in U.S. culture, deportation was effectively a death sentence.
We hope you find the story as moving as we do – and that if you do, you share with those for whom the story will have particular poignancy and urgency.
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Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture. Writerland, The Delacorte Review Newsletter comes out every other week. Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and website. Never miss an update.
I'm not an editor by trade, but I've found myself in an editorial position at work. I've learned that when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
I also think it takes a lot of confidence to refrain from intervening, not just in editing but in any collaborative endeavor. I see this in the agency world a lot. Everyone has to leave their mark on a piece of work. Often, it has nothing to do with what the work needs and more to do with what the person leaving the feedback wants to convey.
Thanks for writing, Michael.