Meeting the editor

What’s today—the first Monday of the month? Let’s call this Meet the Editor Monday.

So, I woke up LOATHING my own fiction this morning. It’s a loathe-your-own-fiction kind of morning at our house today.

Do you ever get that feeling?

Here’s something you maybe don’t know about being a professional fiction editor: it’s a one-way pass. It’s a developed skill, yes, that takes decades to hone and even then—like every skill—can never be entirely perfected. There’s a certain mind-set I go into to read a new manuscript, in which I can catch the structure issues, awkward phrases, and character inconsistencies popping out at me. It’s almost hypnosis.

I remember reading such things when I was an amateur and only getting a, “Go/Don’t Go,” response from my head, but now I can tune my brain to get a ton of information, and what doesn’t pop out I know how to outline for. It’s a great job. Have I mentioned that before? I LOVE this work.

I’ve spent thirty years letting my manuscripts go cold and then hauling them back out again, fighting my way into that mind-set, outlining and analyzing, re-reading words I know better than my own telephone number for those pop-outs. After awhile, it all becomes a blur. Did I change that before? Did I just think about changing it? Have I changed it back and forth multiple times and just forgotten? What the heck was the significance of the purple hat, anyway?

I mean, a professional bookkeeper should be able to keep their own books, right? A professional jockey should be able to ride their own horse. A professional ball-player should be able to throw a ball to their own kid.

I know lots of professional carpenters who built their own houses.

But editing is the bizarro reality of combing wet hair. It’s infinitely easier to comb your own wet hair than to have someone else do it for you. It’s exactly the opposite with editing.

And it’s due to one thing: perspective.

I used to read tarot cards, free, for anyone. They’re great! I once read the cards for every single person on my backpackers’ bus through New Zealand, both islands, including the driver. And if there is one thing tarot and fiction have in common, it’s the need for perspective.

Tarot is a game with symbolism. They’re just a handful of archetypical concepts, and the odds that one out of any given eleven will ring a bell are pretty good. So I could sit down with a total stranger and tell them what the cards said about the relationships between the archetypes in their lives, and they’d reel back in their chair gasping, “How do they know?”

They don’t know. They’re cardboard.

But practicing that eye for plot has helped me enormously in catching things that pop out of manuscripts. The less I know about the extraneous details (how many times you’ve had to rewrite the tricky scene at Plot Point 1 when the protagonist meets their nemesis face-to-face for the first time, what in your own life this is based on, why this is an adventure and not a love story), the more vividly what’s there pops out.

It is insanely difficult for me to read the cards for myself. In the same way, I know way too much about my own writing. Infinitum. When I reach the Self-Loathing Phase of Revision, I’m like the Hindenberg.

It’s as though your fiction were your family, and you’re so used to it you don’t even notice Uncle Henry’s guy friends hug and kiss him a lot more than most uncle’s guy friends do, because your grandmother has always been adamant he’s just waiting for the right woman to come along; Aunt Petunia’s uncontrollable rages seem exactly like rages, but everyone else says they’re just high spirits; cousin Chris has terrible bad luck with the police, the elders all think, even though it looks a lot like bad judgment. It can really be quite a surprise to reach middle-age and realize, “It is kind of odd we have to avoid mentioning religion in front of Grandpa, even though we share his beliefs, isn’t it?”

Families can be strange as hell and still look perfectly normal from the inside. As my husband says: “weirder than a sack of aliens.”

So welcome to you own fiction, folks. Is it impossible to tell whether or not Uncle Henry’s secret life comes through to the reader, when it doesn’t come through to his mother? Are you wracking your brains over how to show Aunt Petunia’s rages from an angle that leaves some doubt about whether or not she’s just a high-spirited kind of gal? Can you create legal entanglements for cousin Chris without losing the motivation of the rest of the crowd in overlooking them?

And what IS wrong with Grandpa?

There’s a point at which you just throw up your hands and say, “I hear ice-fishing in Alaska is a fascinating hobby.”

I, however, know how to spot this stuff in other people’s work and how to fix it. I’ve been training for decades, professionally and personally, and I’ve got clients whose work makes me proud of the field of fiction.

Today I may LOATHE my own work.

But I love yours! I’m really excited about yours.