Conversing with Magazine Editors
This coming Saturday April 23rd, I will be attending the Conversations and Connections conference in Washington, DC. This one day conference brings together writers, editors, and publishers in a friendly, supportive environment. The past two years, this conference has been held in Pittsburgh, and is returning this weekend to the magazine’s roots in The District. This conference is organized by the fine folks at Barrelhouse Magazine, and I was invited to attend by my friend, founding editor Dave Housley.
I’m participating in two events: Speed Dating with Editors and the Editors’ Panel. Should be a good time. On the Editors’ Panel, I’ll be with Marcos Martinez, Michelle Webber, Emily Rich, and Nate Brown to discuss all sorts of editorial issues, questions, and (hopefully) answers. Here’s the boilerplate from the conference website:
Editors from a number of new and established literary magazines and small presses discuss the ins and outs and nuts and bolts of both sides of the literary fence: researching and submitting work, and reviewing the work that comes in through the proverbial (and now mostly virtual) slush pile, from what gets them excited about a story/poem/essay/book to the kinds of mistakes that might make your writing easy to reject. Questions will be taken from the audience, as well as pre-conference via email and Twitter.
All of which sounds terrific. But I’ve recently been thinking about something else in regards to editing.
I have a story forthcoming in a literary magazine. It was accepted by the editor-in-chief, but the particular issue my story will appear in is being edited by a guest editor. Several months after my story was accepted for publication, the guest editor sent me his edits on my story, and to say that I don’t care for them is an understatement. My story has been chopped from 5200 words to 4100. There is a lot of red (or Microsoft Word strikethrough, which in this case, is in blue). Rather than looking closely at my language and its mechanics, the guest editor has rewritten my story.
There are many things that the guest editor is correct about when it comes to characterization and setting. The guest editor isn’t wrong, but the story has been given surgery rather than physical therapy. It’s taken me a few weeks to calm down and read through the edits with a clear head and actually work on the piece, which I’m finally doing, and the story is (I hope) better, though how it will go over when I submit my newest version, I have no idea.
Being an editor at a literary magazine is very different from being an editor at a newspaper or popular magazine. Literary magazine editing is often not done at all; far too many publications simply check for spelling errors, layout an accepted piece in InDesign, and send it to the printer. Not much editing, per se. At Missouri Review, associate editor Evelyn Somers was dedicated to editing every prose piece in the issue. For her, editing is a conversation with the writer: why did you make this choice? what are you trying to say here? Very few literary magazines have the resources to give this kind of care to the work. It’s one of the reasons why Missouri Review has been one of the best literary magazines for almost forty years.
For a writer publishing in literary magazines, this editorial relationship is critical to be aware of. In the end, the person that has to live with the way the story is written is the, well, the writer. The magazine won’t fix the story, won’t fix the essay, won’t make it “better.” I still cringe at sentences in my book, stories that have, presumably, been edited by the magazine they first appeared in AND by my publisher. Years ago, I had a story published in a magazine where I really clashed with the editor about the revisions, particularly the last scene, during which, in our email discussions, I realized the editor and I saw the story and its protagonist in completely different ways. More recently, I received proofs on a novella and I spent about eight hours and sent them sixty additional changes. And the novella was significantly better for it.
So much of this, of course, falls back on the writer. I’m not sure that the younger me could hear and listen to discuss my work with an editor in the right way. A few years of conversations with writers I’ve published, editors who have published me, fellow editors and readers, and numerous agents who have read my work and agents who have rejected my work, all of them have shaped my ability to recognize good and bad and all the in-between editorial advice about my fiction. A few of these lessons have been hard. A few are really obvious, in the here and now. Ultimately, this all comes back to the writer. After all, it’s the writer’s name on the story, not the editor’s name.
Literary editing is a conversation, and the art of a literary conversation is a challenge for both writer and editor. I hope this weekend that our Editors’ Panel can help the attendees see that good literary editing is not simply about selecting (“I’m the Decider!”) but about working together to shape the story into the best story it can possibly be. Why would we want anything but our best?
Follow Michael on Twitter: @mpnye
I had a similar situation occur a few years ago. Out of all the work I’ve published, it ranks as the worst experience. It differed slightly in that there wasn’t a guest editor. Rather the editors accepted a story in the “We love this” vein. They commented that they thought it was incredibly unique and were very happy to be publishing it. Generally, it’s been my experience that when the editors want changes, they’ll let you know up front when they’re accepting or it will be in the submission guidelines that accepted work will be subject to an edit and don’t gush in quite this fashion.
Before publication I received an email stating that I had 24 hours to look over an edit of the piece. So I thought, Okay, no problem. The file was in word with the track changes on, and there were changes to every line. In some cases, they hadn’t just made suggestions for edits but had taken it upon themselves to rewrite sentences and add text. They had also changed past tense to present for reasons unbeknownst to me. Now the conundrum comes that the literary world is small and no writer wants to get any kind of reputation as difficult to work with, but this was ridiculous and I didn’t know how to say it. Given they had provided only 24 hours in which to respond, I essentially took the tack of, just pull the piece. I really don’t like what you did to it and I don’t know how to begin in the course of a day to respond. I felt terrible having to say this, and it was heartbreaking after acceptance to have to go back to square one. But I couldn’t in good conscience allow them to publish what they gave me. (Essentially, I felt like they were enthusiastic about the idea of my story rather than the execution and wanted to take it and do their own version). In the end, they backtracked and said these were just suggestions and published the piece as I’d originally intended.
I agree with you that it should be a conversation, and I have no problem engaging in conversation. I’ve had later experiences where the editors worked on my stories, sent me the file with the track changes on, and provided a week, and I was always willing to engage in those circumstances. When those editors wanted a sentence changed, they would offer a suggestion but leave the ultimate rewriting of text up to me. That’s a much better approach than the one I experienced above. But especially because I was younger and newer to publishing at that time, I didn’t know how to handle it. I wasn’t resistant to the idea of working with an editor but I felt hemmed in. It seemed to me that they had all the power and I had none. They made me feel a lot like I had to either acquiesce or pull the piece. There’s very little information out there, it seems, on how to deal with this from a writer’s point of view.