It strikes me that editors asking for changes is simply another way of stripping our voices from the work. Whatcha think? Yes, a good editor can focus a work but I don’t see that happening more than once in every hundred billion sentences. If then. I think changing a writer’s content and execution is a scam, a con job to keep “editors” in business, and to get our stuff to conform to what ever “sells”. Which is of course decided ahead of time. Copy-editing is vital. Errors diminish. Beyond that, is it your work, or a collaboration? Is it your voice, or a translation?
This is part of what every writer struggles with. If you don’t accept the bullying, you don’t get to play.
Self-publishing sets writers free from this. It also demonstrates how very few who call themselves writers can actually write without backup.
Turns out most writing is more chorus than soliloquy.
The farther back in writing history one goes, the less editing was done. Could Tristram Shandy even have been published had there been editors wagging fingers and shaking heads over its excesses? Admittedly that’s an extreme example but look at Finnegans Wake. Joyce could not even get Ulysses published error free, thanks to editors and typesetters “correcting” his work, let alone the magnificence of Finnegans Wake.
Ah, you say, ears perking: That stuff’s unreadable self-indulgent artsy-fartsy bullshit.
Let us look then at poetry. We’ll squint, it won’t do you much harm. To make the point, an anecdote: Dylan Thomas, drunk, lived above a pub. He usually came down at 5. One day he came down late and was asked why. “I spent the entire day placing a comma. Then I removed it.”
His point: Poetry requires precision, not editors. Editing poetry is something done only in graduate courses where the goal is, yes, indoctrination into the latest fashion or the newest acceptable pattern. “How quaint, you RHYMED your poetry? Wow, it’s automatically dreck; we do NOT rhyme anymore…” And so on.
Poetry requires precision on the part of the poet.
Guess what? Short stories and novels are no different, if writers but shoulder the responsibility for their own work.
One’s fat is another’s lean. Look how Reader’s Digest Books condense novels. It’s called bowdlerizing, regardless of intent. Homogenizing. Like the newspaper USA TODAY, it’s calculated to make it easy to read, to scan, to digest, to understand. It uses the Flesch and Gunning-Fogg indexes to reduce things to a fourth-grade reading level and vocabulary. Modern readers cannot even read Victorian newspapers, let alone fiction, without great difficulty. We have degraded.
“We’re just cutting fat, so the story flows,” editors cry.
Mark Twain’s digressions, ramblings, asides, and ruminations are precisely what give his work his voice, yet that would be “fat” to be “cut” to improve “story flow” to any “editor”.
“An Editor would edit the Word of God,” Isaac Asimov once wrote in frustration.
Yes, I’m an outlier. I don’t do the fat part of the Bell Curve. I’m in good company, though.
This is why self publishing is opportunity and burden, encouragement and threat. Take responsibility for one’s own writing and self publishing is liberation that allows your genuine, unfiltered, unaltered voice to reach readers. Anything less than precision in all levels of your work produces only dreck that readers will ignore.
From cradle to grave, the old saw goes. In writing, it’s From cover to rave. It’s yours to earn, if you can, that acclaim. Carry your own weight.
All you have to lose is the filter, the bottleneck, the gate-keepers.
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