Snippets
Some good reasons to submit to a press or magazine are: you like the press or magazine, the publish things you like, they will give you money, they have great covers, they have great designs, they will promote you as a writer, they will make you feel good about yourself, and they will reject your thing if it’s not ready.
Here’s another one I don’t see discussed as often: they will edit your work well and make you look good. (This is rare.) (And here is the most important, never-mentioned advantage: You learn from being edited. My novel’s editor cut a whole bunch of dialogic tags, i.e., “he said”s, from my book. I learned that I was using far too many. Now I’m using fewer. It feels great.)
Let’s talk about what we’ve learned from our editors.
Editors can be great, but we have to be open to receiving critical feedback. And, God, the trust to hand over something like a novel or collection that took years to create and land in the hands of a complete stranger.
We all want a Gordon Lish with a blue pencil, but how many editor’s are actually that invested in an artist’s work?
I’ve learned that most editors know more about fashion and grooming than I do, and can often recommend creams and lotions more suited to my pH balance than the ones I use.
i am REALLY starting to wonder about you A D Jameson
AD JAMESON DID YOU READ THE RACHEL CURTIS STORY IN THE MARCH ISSUE OF HARPER’S? IN IT THE SISTER’S PROTAGONIST RECCOMENDS PUTTING A LITTLE BIT OF COCONUT OIL IN YOUR BATH WATER (ALSO, TAKE A BATH) WHICH LEAVES YOUR SKIN FEELING SOFT, “NOT GREASY AT ALL!”
ANYWAY JUST A THOUGHT
Thanks, ZZZZZIPPP! And thanks, mimi! I need all the help I can get.
It puts the lotion on the Huey Lewis cassette.
Personally I try to trust every editor I work with as far as I can manage, up to and including taking advice I actively dislike. I don’t make a rule of it or anything, but I try, and in my experience it works out for me much more often than not.
But yeah, not enough editors edit in the first place. There are some venues I wish I could publish with every year, just to work with the editors that often.
in grad school, chris bachelder pointed out how i would write one good sentence, then i would try to top it twice, except instead of topping the first sentence, the extra two sentences got worse. that was invaluable. a good editor can see into the math of everything we think is magic.
That’s exactly the kind of thing I mean; that’s amazing.
In grad school one instructor (Craig Holden) pointed out I was substituting adjectives for adverbs pretty often. I said, “Yeah, I do that ’cause my wife does it and it sounds cool when she does it.” And he was like, “Yeah, but it sounds bad when YOU do it.”
After that I pretty much stopped.
did you read alex chee’s thing about workshops that was on buzzfeed? pretty solid: http://www.buzzfeed.com/alexanderchee/my-parade
I didn’t, but I will.
and smelling like a delicious piña colada
: )
I learned that my words usually want to go to the end of the page. After a number of failures, I figured out (via sage suggestions from both editors and teachers, as well as friends) that when I attempt to write poems (I rarely do this anymore), they usually come out as narratives that are better suited to prose. So now it is my general policy to look at the poem I just wrote (if I wrote one), smile, pat myself on the back for writing a poem, maybe even call myself a “poet” in my head if I think it sounds nice that day, then just take out all the line breaks, tweak it a little, and publish it as flash fiction or microfiction or whatever so long as the words go to the end of the page. It took a lot of really bad line breaks to figure out this simple, personally-useful trick and to discover that I was writing prose all along without knowing it.
a silly, but v important and helpful, thing i learned from an editor was to stop typing “–” when i mean “–” (<–––option & the key next to zero on a mac)
Christ, just had a turning-around-little-girl-to-realise-she-has-an-old-lady’s-face moment, reading this. I’m going to have to re-evaluate my life goals.