GUILT:”It seemed to me that I would labor to create something beautiful, only to hand it on to people with meat cleavers for brains. They would often overstep their bounds by rearranging paragraphs, revealing what they thought were holes, even suggesting entirely different beginnings or endings. They would hand me back what looked like Frankenstein’s monster.”

Ug. I did this this week. And its torturing me. I’ve been working w. a really great author on a story (not for Irreantum) that just wasn’t working. Something was missing, off, lost, and yet the story itself–the concept, the prose–is wonderful. I suggested this person try developing some ideas, and those ideas became paragraphs of beautiful prose that, in the final analysis, slowed the start. There were time shift issues that made the story confusing. I cut an entire scene–a flashback–because, once I began hacking parts off, it became apparent that the remainder of the story implied each of the ideas that the flashback showed. But cutting all this required moving paragraphs to new locations. So I’m totally, completely guilty of every aspect of Stephen’s complaint.

But there I sat w. a “final” version and, while the author had improved it, the story still had a limp. I hadn’t helped this person in the right way right away.

It was a real conundrum for me. Should I continue working, possibly for weeks, hoping to nudge the writer into recognizing that the story needed to be condensed, or demonstrate how to condense it and get it ready for press quicker? Should I just send it on to Stephen,knowing he’d likely have at it himself–maybe even say no to publishing it, or should I pull out the meat cleaver?

I chose the cleaver. How could I show the writer what I saw if I didn’t cut away the excess? So paragraphs fell like long locks of hair. It all seemed perfectly logical to me, but it killed me to hit that send button and return the “final”. I’ve been on the receiving end of these hatchet jobs too many times. I live in fear of having a writer feel like I’ve destroyed their story.

I wish everything that came in was polished and ready for print. But it sometimes doesn’t work that way. I hate being that meat cleaver editor, but, at times, I am. It’s like Stephen said: I feel an “ownership” even if my part as a fiction editor is small. I don’t think I like feeling responsible for stories that aren’t my own.

Speaking back to the MFA question, I would much rather have an editor than an instructor.