I tear other people’s writing to pieces for a living.
They actually don’t pay me for the tearing-to-pieces part, nor do they tend to thank me for it. Sometimes, when I speak to them on the phone, they laugh about how very many things I’ve changed in their work, and behind their laughter I can hear them thinking, God, I hate you.
But they don’t pay me to like me. They pay me to be ruthless, and to make them sound good.
(I should probably clarify that I don’t edit fiction professionally. I don’t have the training for that. It’s academics upon whom I train my complete lack of empathy. The raw material and the editing skills required to shape it are quite different. Emotionally, though, it’s pretty much the same kettle of fish.)
I feel sorry for my clients, because I know what it feels like to be edited. It’s not fun. It’s so far from fun, in fact, that most people experience being edited as the equivalent of being told “You suck” over and over again. You suck. You really suck. Your commas suck. Your verb tenses suck. You can’t use prepositions properly. Your writing sucks. You have no ideas, but the ones you have suck. I talk about your shitty writing behind your back. Also, I hate you, and it would be better for everyone if you would just quit writing and find something nonverbal to do with your time.
It feels this way even when the editing is an act of love. Maybe especially then. I had a good friend in college who was struggling with a writing class, and he asked me to help him with his papers. I adored this guy. I bled red ink all over his essay. I was trying to help, but I think probably he wanted to hurt me afterward. He never showed me another paper.
I’ve spoken to a lot of people about receiving edits, and so I can state with confidence that self-loathing is a near-universal reaction to the process. It’s certainly mine. In grad school, I learned to glance quickly over my graded papers and then throw them in a drawer for several weeks until I no longer even remotely cared about them. Then I’d pull them back out, read them over, and think, “This isn’t so bad. Why did it feel so much like I was being stabbed when I read these comments the first time?”
Distance helps. We all fall in love with our work, but eventually the buzz wears off, especially if we’ve moved on to something newer and more exciting. Better not to try to do the heavy lifting, editing-wise, when you think of your manuscript as your beautiful, precious baby. If you write romance and you want to bone your hero (as you should), better to wait to do the major edits until the time comes when you think of him fondly as a particularly excellent ex-boyfriend. It’ll be easier to see his flaws then, and you won’t care about them so much because you’re having such a grand time with the New Guy.
But sometimes we don’t have the time or the inclination to put our work aside, and even when we do, it’s not as if editing becomes easier. Editing is a harsh bitch. When I started out as a professional editor, I had this idea that over time I would develop the skills to not absolutely loathe being chin-deep in sorting out the problems with a manuscript.
It hasn’t happened. It’s never going to happen.
Editing is HARD, y’all. It’s work. Our brains can only juggle so many things at once, and when we edit we’re asking them to remember all the details of plot and character and story, plus all the times we’ve already used the word “apex,” plus what the rhythm of that last paragraph was like and what the next one is like, and Jeezy Pete, it’s impossible.
And, sadly, the only way to get through it is to do it. It’s exactly like writing in that way. You can’t sell a book you haven’t written yet, you can’t improve words that aren’t on the page, and you sure as hell can’t assess whether or not your Genius Revision Plan is going to work until you chop that broken-ass manuscript up into pieces, move them all around, write the new bits, loathe yourself, loathe your work, loathe all of humanity, faff around on Twitter for an hour, and finally pull yourself together and get the job done.
It takes repetition. It takes more than one pass. You have to work your way through the horrid, Frankensteinian pass, and then you do the Shop-Vaccing-up-the-blood-and-gore pass, and then you go through with the mop and bucket, and the next thing you know you have a story that you can bear to read again. A less-horrible story, or possibly even a good one.
To the extent that anybody gets better at editing — and to the extent that one becomes inured to the process in all its hateful glory — I think it happens because we come to understand and live with its horribleness, and because we learn, in a sort of bone-deep way, that our words are not precious.
Words are infinitely malleable. They are replenishable. They are adjustable. Your individual phrases, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, do not matter. It’s the ideas that matter, the characters and the stories. Not the sentences, and not the effort that went into them. Sometimes, your story will be better served by the deletion of three or four chapters. So what you do is, you delete them. Then you write new ones.
The new ones will be better. The new ones are always better.
Though they’ll probably require some editing.
