Today we’re linking to the New Yorker publication of the original version of Raymond Carver’s famous short story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” as edited by the famous editor Gordon Lish.
If you don’t know who Gordon Lish was, you will learn. Take note, all ye aspiring writers who someday hope to be edited: Lish was famous and influential, and his name is known throughout editing circles. But when he cut the whole last third of Carver’s story off and re-named it without even discussing the title first with Carver, he was wrong.
Only famous and influential editors get to slash-&-burn and make wholesale alterations like that. The rest of us have to respect the writer’s ownership of their own work.
If you don’t know who Raymond Carver was, go find out. The best lesson you can learn from him is: write what you know.
Drinking and smoking and being broke and divorced was what Carver knew.
And out of what he knew, Carver created literature.
Punny blog title. Thanks for linking to that article. It made my lunch infinitely more enjoyable. It also made me wonder how much I would compromise my work to please an editor who held my success in his or her back pocket.
Yes, Marie, it does throw a whole new light on the publishing industry, doesn’t it? That such a thing could have happened to someone as widely-read and respected as Carver? That Gordon Lish—who has a huge reputation—could have been that freaking ignorant about the whole craft of editing?
It’s a piranha pool out here, folks. You really need to be prepared.
And, for the record, a professional editor edits as little as humanly possible while aiming for the highest possible quality. It is not only perfectly possible, I do it all the time. If a piece needs the kind of deep and devastating cuts that King says Lish did to Carver’s work—well, they might as well just send it back. According to King, the cuts weren’t necessary for quality, only to adapt Carver’s work to Lish’s voice. And I’m going to go out on a limb here and say I trust King’s judgment.
That review’s a pleasure to read simply because it’s so well-written. King’s good.
Victoria