The Problem With Being Edited

Previously in my minor complaints series: The problem with waking up later than everyone else is feeling like a persecuted lion at a second-rate circus, and the problem with being asked to write blurbs is the temptation to call something “a slim volume of surprising force.”

Greetings from Chatner Central! Before we begin in earnest, I’m offering a 20% discount on paid subscriptions for the remaining “cucumber days” of late summer (also called the silly season, the slow news season, the “summer news-hole,” la morte-saison, the news drought, or the rotting-month stories):

“When the gay world is no longer gathered together in London…the great men have gone out of town, work is left to feebler hands…In the dead of autumn, when the second and third rate hands are on, we sink from nonsense written with a purpose to nonsense written because the writer must write either nonsense or nothing.”

Patrick Leigh Fermor describes the unique situation of his early childhood in the introduction to his travel memoir A Time of Gifts. Unexpectedly separated from parents during World War One, he spends the first four years of his life doing exactly as he pleases on a Northamptonshire farm, which renders him constitutionally incapable of growing up as he is supposed to once he’s restored to the bosom of his family:

“Those marvellously lawless years, it seems, had unfitted me for the faintest shadow of constraint…Harmless in appearance, more presentable by now and of a refreshingly unconstricted address, I would earn excellent opinions at first. But as soon as early influences began to tell, those short-lived virtues must have seemed a cruel Fauntleroy veneer, cynically assumed to mask the Charles Addams fiend that lurked beneath: it coloured with an even darker tinct the sum of misdeeds which soon began heaping up. When I catch a glimpse of similar children today, I am transfixed with fellow-feelings, and with dread.”

My formal education ended in total collapse and defeat, almost entirely through my own failure of nerve. I was the sort of child who hated being asked to think more than I loved being praised. On subjects that came easily to me I was tractable, even precocious, attentive, diligent, and eager. All other subjects I avoided. Some of them I dismissed as unimportant, when what I really meant was I found them difficult, and I found everything that was not immediately and intuitively easy to be difficult.

At other times I would be disarmingly, disingenuously humble: How very confusing this all is! I’m afraid I’ll simply never understand it. No, you’ve explained it all beautifully, and I’m very grateful to you; my brain simply doesn’t work that way. “My brain simply doesn’t work that way” was always my code for “I’m not going to work at this any longer, and you can’t make me.” I would demonstrate such game humility, play the part of the gracious loser and the good sport, that I could often manage to deflect censure for my refusal to try and even attract praise for my conspicuously positive attitude. Premature cheerful resignation was the name of the game; like Fred Astaire I was always looking for an excuse to take one on the chin and walk away with my head held high.

This did not, as you might imagine, serve me very well; I continued to be good at the things which already came naturally to me and showed very little improvement anywhere else, and successfully managed to evade both pedagogy and effort until college. Through a careful series of evasions, distractions, and diversions, I received admission to only two schools: St. Peter’s College in Oxford, and Azusa Pacific, an evangelical Christian university about twenty minutes outside of Pasadena. I had flown East twice, first to New York and then to Oxford, to interview for St. Peter’s, and jumped through all manner of hoops to get there. I had applied to Azusa Pacific (“God First”: Founded 1899) at the last possible minute out of a combination of boredom, panic, and terror. I carefully avoided thinking about what these two very different options might mean for my future, ignored the offer letter from St. Peter’s, settled in for a very unpleasant four years at APU, where I wildly resented everyone around me for a decision I myself had made, and went on to graduate on time and without honors.

In much the same way I’ve largely managed to avoid being edited for the bulk of my career as a writer; the collapse of print media has certainly helped with this, although maybe it’s more strictly correct to say that I was able to leverage the collapse of print media in my favor only in this one small area.

This means that on the rare occasion that I do receive edits on a piece for print I react with the same baffled fury and impotent rage of Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden: The idea of revisiting something I have already written puts me in the most confounding of moods, and I become sulky, contradictory, and capricious. Unwilling to say what I actually think (“I don’t want to look at what I’ve written and think about it a second time, I’m unprepared to defend any arguments I might have made or furnish sources for any claims; please just do whatever you like for the second draft and let’s forget I ever had a hand in writing this”), I make things twice as worse as they need to be for everyone involved by trying to reread as little of my own writing as possible, guessing what I think a plausible answer might be, and saying “Sure!” to questions that require a definitive answer.

Like any writer, I can also get defensive about certain turns of phrase I think ought to be safeguarded by a Preservation Society, or think I’ve done something well and want to protect it from change — but my usual problem with receiving edits is not being asked to change, it’s being asked to think.

The first round doesn’t usually go too badly, especially since the first round of edits usually come from my agent, who I know and like very well, or the editor I’ve already been working with most closely at whatever magazine has commissioned the piece. “I know you,” my lower-brain says in tones of real relief. “You are not a stranger to me, and bear me no ill-will. I can do a series of modest favors for you in and remain cheerful.” I might dodge the email for a few days if it arrived during a moment where I particularly did not want to be emailed, or if I’m in the middle of an especially exciting round of Civilization 6, or something. But I’ll get around to it.

The real problems arrive with the second round of edits. Now I am being sent editable PDFs or Microsoft Word documents with track changes turned on, and the margins are flurried with little notes about “” and [Remove P] and I begin to bristle. People I’ve never met before, people I’ve never heard of in my goddamn life, are leaving me little notes like “Source?” and “Move to second graf?” and I start to sound like Mr. Banks from Mary Poppins (Who are you people? What the devil are you doing in my home? Clear out, all of you!) or a cornered villain in a movie about hostages (You’re the one who’s killing her with every step you take towards me!).

I’ll see a perfectly ordinary suggestion like “Possible paraphrase?” or “Who said this?” and think:

• Oh, you’re here to kill me! You want me to die? It is your hope that I should die and become dead, and you would like to kill me, over this?

• I only changed this in the first place because another one of you wanted me to change it earlier. Who are you people? I don’t know you. I don’t know any of you. You haven’t got permission to be here. Only Papa can grant permission to visitors to the garden, and I don’t believe any of you know him — Papa would never know such horrid people —

• What are you doing in my house? I’ve never met you. We’ve never been introduced.

• Who are you? Are you anybody? You — you piano player. Are you anybody?

• Why don’t I die? Why don’t I die? Why don’t you just kill me and I’ll die?

• Please, I’m so tired — so awfully tired — I just want to close my eyes and sleep —

• I don’t know why I said it! I don’t know why I said it! Are you happy? I didn’t mean anything by it! Send the rats to Julia, do it to Julia, I don’t care what you do to her, tear her face off, not me, Julia, not me!

• What use it to tell of the long, long hours of horror more than mortal, during which I counted the rushing vibrations of the steel! Inch by inch — line by line — with a descent only appreciable at intervals that seemed ages — down and still down it came! Days passed — it might have been that many days passed — ere it swept so closely over me as to fan me with its acrid breath. The odor of the sharp steel forced itself into my nostrils. I prayed — I wearied heaven with my prayer for its more speedy descent. I grew frantically mad, and struggled to force myself upward against the sweep of the fearful scimitar. And then I fell suddenly calm, and lay smiling at the glittering death, as a child at some rare bauble.

• Fine! Fine! Change it!

• I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you

• Yes!

• Yes, change it!

• I don’t know what I meant! Change it! Change it! Strike it from the record, strike it off at the head, I am not here today to defend whatever it was I said yesterday!

• I see what you mean now, I see it, I see it, I’m sorry, get rid of it, I don’t want to look at it again — don’t make me look at it again — don’t remind me, please —!

• I — you’ll think this very foolish, I’m afraid — but I had not realized there would be quite so many notes to read, and sentences to change. What do you say: let’s just be gentlemen about this, and call it quits, with no hard feelings?

[Image via Wikimedia Commons]