A Valentine to My Editors by Anthony J. Mohr
Here’s a tale with a happy ending, almost. An old friend wrote a short story, submitted it, and found a home. Then the editor did what editors do—made some minor revisions.
Dander up, my friend objected to all of them. Over dinner a day or two later, when he told me what the editor wanted: shift a sentence. Switch a word. Remove a phrase. Between bites of my pasta, I said the suggestions sounded good; I’d read the story and thought they might strengthen it.
The story is perfect as is, he said, loudly enough for the family at the table next to ours to turn in our direction.
Bottom line: the magazine didn’t print his story. That was several years ago and the piece remains unpublished.
While my friend has a right to his prose, I have a different take. A good editor can make you look better. Maybe I’ve been lucky. Several with whom I’ve worked vastly improved my product.
It goes without saying you will have disagreements. One editor wanted to retitle an essay that he’d taken. I liked mine. His alternative was humdrum, far from catchy, so I thought. Back and forth we went, until I prevailed. Doing something I’d never seen before or since, another editor, along with her acceptance letter, sent back a submission with ninety-two line edits, ranging from punctuation nits to striking an entire paragraph. I had a choice. Negotiate with her or hope for another acceptance. I opted for the former, because, after perusing what she’d done, I realized her efforts and improved my essay. And most important, she’d demonstrated that she cared. But at one point, she’d eliminated a short passage that I treasured; I thought it was funny.
It didn’t service the essay, she said. We talked further, and in the end, I killed that darling.
Also valuable were two editors who urged several excellent changes to my memoir, Every Other Weekend—Coming of Age With Two Different Dads. The publisher assigned the right people. Our dealings were never confrontational. We’d work down the page; they’d mention a word or a phrase that needed massaging and sometimes a passage we should eliminate. At one point we agreed to switch the order of two chapters. I estimate that each of them and I spent four hours on Zoom going page by page. I appreciated their time; they valued my words. They wanted my writing to be as strong as possible. Their reactions and their input gave me a greater sense of confidence. They made me believe that putting my book out into the world would not be embarrassing.
My advice: don’t resist editors. Embrace them. You’ll be glad you did.
