One of the things I worried about when I became a teacher was forgetting what it was like to be a student. I didn’t want to be one of those teachers who expected students to just “get it.” I didn’t want to bulldoze my students with excessive information or overwhelming expectations. Because learning can be hard.

I had the same fear when I became an editor. Would I forget what it was like to labor over a piece only to have it dissected and delivered to me in a bag?

I think I kept my sense of empathy while I was a teacher because I had to go back to school myself during that time. So I was on both ends of the red pen. But, because editing takes up so much of my time, I haven’t been doing a lot of writing lately – at least, not the kind that feels like wresting an organ from your body.

But a few days ago, I had an experience that made me a humbler editor.

I used to say that I’m almost finished editing a documentary film, but the critique I received from a veteran filmmaker made me revise my statement. I am now in the middle of editing a documentary film.

I shot the film from 2004 to 2006, gathering 125 hours of footage, and I’ve been editing it ever since. It has been a bigger job that I had originally thought. I made transcripts of all the tapes. I put together story outlines. I logged and captured footage. I put sequences together. I added this piece and chucked that. But after years of work, I finally had what I thought looked like a pretty decent movie. I let a few friends look at it, and they had all said positive things, none really offering any suggestions for improvement (besides things like adding Angelina Jolie to the cast).

So I sent the movie off to this filmmaker for a critique, my hopes high that I could have it in the festival circuit this fall. He was very encouraging, but I could tell from his forthright analysis that I have at least another year of work ahead of me.

A year of work.

Kinda grates on the ears, doesn’t it?

I sat feeling exhausted and discouraged for a while after that conversation. But as I thought over the suggestions he had given me, I could start to see the logic behind them. I could see how they would affect the flow of the story, and I could see that they would make the film better. I was suddenly very grateful for every incision the filmmaker had made into my movie’s body. But I can still see all that work stretching out in the front of me, and I’m not exactly chomping at the bit.

I’m going to do it, though. Seems a waste to spend such a large period of my life on a project without bringing it as close to perfection as possible. For me, few pleasures are greater than crafting something with microscopic precision. It’s almost like creating a self-sustaining life – something that works especially well because it’s rooted in principles that unify the life and vitality poured into it.

I’m not a trained filmmaker. I’m an amateur. I don’t have a strong grasp of the principles of cinema (one look at a lot of my camera work would convince you quickly). I’m glad that someone who has been working in documentary film since before I was born is willing to guide me. I’m glad not in spite of the fact that he points out the weaknesses in my work, but because he does.

I feel a lot like the people from hell in C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce who step off a bus that has brought them to heaven, only to find out that even the grass they try to stand upon is more substantial than they are. They all need someone who is willing to help them grow more solid, especially if they’re thinking about staying.

I appreciate my critiquer’s encouragement, but I appreciate his honest analysis even more. He’s right, I don’t want to put out half-baked work. If my life is worth investing in this project, I’m going to make sure the investment pays off.

So, as an editor, I will be more encouraging, because I want people to write. I want them to have faith that their offerings are honored and that they can make a difference in the world. But I will also insist on honoring those offerings to the fullest by insisting that they enter the world as perfect as our combined powers can manage.

Do you watch House M.D.? On the third season’s last DVD there’s a short sequence on how some of the show’s cast and crew got a little jazz band together – Hugh Laurie himself at the piano (and yes, he even plays “Minnie the Moocher” for all those Jeeves and Wooster fans out there).

At one point in the sequence, Laurie mentions that, until now, he had been under the impression that producers had the sole responsibility of driving expensive cars around.

I had been under a similar impression about editors. I wasn’t so naïve as to think that they could afford expensive cars, but I was certain that their sole responsibility was to tap writers on the head with their magic wand and turn them into authors. Oh, and they also corrected spelling errors.

As it turns out, editors do actually work; and their work is much different than I had expected.

I need to drop the producer metaphor here and take up a football metaphor.

Lots of people watch football on television or at their local high school. If a young person (let’s call him Bill), who had watched many of these games, decides to play football with some friends, he doubtless has no trouble going through the motions he had seen in previous games: hiking the ball, throwing it, tackling, running.

Perhaps Bill plays football with his friends for years, and eventually feels that he has the talent to play in the professional leagues. He shows up at the door of the local professional team and presents himself as player material.

But he finds that he can’t even get past the secretary. “I’m a perfectly good football player,” Bill tells her, “I always get picked first in games, and they always have me play quarterback.”

The secretary is compassionate and gives him a phone number. “Call this guy,” she says, “He can help.”

The guy turns out to be a bodybuilding coach. He takes one look at Bill and says, “Boy, you gotta bulk up if you want to get into the big leagues.”

It takes years of work, and not just the work of running and lifting weights, it takes precision work. The bodybuilding coach knows how the body works, he knows which muscles need to be strengthened and how. It also hurts. Bill discovers muscles he never knew existed.

“So when I finally have the muscles, then can I play?” he asks his coach

His coach shakes his head, “You have to actually know how to play football,” he replies.

“But I do know how to play football,” Bill says.

The coach writes down a phone number, “Give this guy a call.”

It turns out to be the number of the local high school football coach. Bill has four more years of work ahead of him, learning how the game of football (on the high school level) actually works, with all the rules in place. He starts to see that a huge array of skills and knowledge that he had never even thought of underlie the playing of football. Watching it on television, football had always looked so easy.

Bill graduates from high school, having become an all-state player. He believes he is ready for the big leagues now. But he still has to compete successfully in college – another four years. And then, if he works hard and has a bit of luck, he might find his way onto a professional team, where his learning curve will begin yet again.

During each of these periods in Bill’s training, he had to have a coach. And, as you may know, coaches aren’t there to tell you what a good job you are doing. They aren’t there to tap you with a magic wand and turn you into a football player. They aren’t there to say nice things about you to the reporters. They are there to force you into the painful work of actually becoming a football player. They are there to explode your preconceptions of how easy football is and train you in the skills invisible to the crowd. They are there because they know, in depth, how the game works.

You probably see where I’m going by now. I used to think that learning to write was a solitary pursuit. You read books and sat at your computer typing. Sometimes you would show your work to a friend or relative, and they would say it was great stuff. So you thought maybe, just maybe, you could make it to the big leagues.

However, writing has been around longer than football and it is just as demanding if you want to get into the big leagues. You need someone who knows writing to help you bulk up: learn your way around a good sentence, paragraph, character, chapter and story. You need coaches who are willing to say, “Sorry kid, there’s a lot more to it than that. Get to work.” Then you need coaches to force you into the painful work of learning to actually play the game; and there are a lot of different games in writing, each with its own set of rules and lore.

Editing, frankly, is often about pain – and always about work. A few years ago I signed up for a class with Alane Ferguson, an Edgar-award winning author whose writing I admire. Sadly, she had to cancel. I wrote, asking her why. She said she was in the middle of a “hideous” revision. “I’m not sleeping, just working and slogging and wishing the revision was OVER!”

This from a professional author. I’d bet money that this revision was not self-inflicted; it was doubtless foisted upon her by her editor. But take look at the product. Alane’s work is so finely tuned that it becomes invisible, allowing the reader to fully enter the story. But it did not come without pain.

After reading all this, you’re probably thinking, “I’m not going to send any of my stuff to Sunstone. Stephen sounds mean!” Don’t worry; I’m a very nice magazine editor. I actually do a lot of your revision for you. In other words, the majority of the time I don’t say “Change this and change that,” I actually make the changes (while keeping the “track changes” function turned on, of course, so you can go through to accept and reject the edits). I also try to give commentary on why I make particular revisions so that the author can see my reasoning.

But I’m a great believer in the author’s abilities. A few times, an author has rejected my actual verbiage whole-hog, but has taken the idea behind the words and used it as a launching pad to do some really fantastic stuff.

I love it when that happens. It means I have a real writer on my hands, someone who takes his or her work seriously. I feel like a football coach watching a player I’ve been working with perform a fast break and plow gloriously into the end zone.

In the end, writing and editing are collaborative projects, each flourishing on the commitment, skill, and investment of the other.

A few days ago, we had a very interesting discussion based on a personal essay about one couple’s experience of loss in fertility treatment. We touched on some of the theological issues surrounding ensoulment, the politics of declaring when life begins, and some of the sociological difficulties around discussions of this topic. All in about a couple thousand words. There’s nothing wrong with that. The discussion was mostly intelligent and constructive, there were useful insights shared. Life is short, we want to communicate efficiently–for many purposes, the executive summary will suffice.

But not for one purpose, which may be the most important one. God commands us to love with all our minds, as well as our hearts. All our minds. To me, that sounds like work. A lot of work, in fact, the kind of work that generates long, footnoted, carefully edited papers like this one. It’s true that we live in an age of multi-tasking, bullet-point lists, attention-grabbing graphics–we are all, whether we want to be or not, masters of the quick, the shallow, the superficial. But our God is not a soundbite God, and he wants our entire, sustained attention. Dead trees, footnotes, and the Chicago Manual of Style are good for learning to slow down and pay attention.

• The staff of Segullah wants you to win!! By that I mean that we are pulling for the people who enter this contest.  We never forget the women behind the stories. And many of us (me, at least) are not widely published, and still consider ourselves to be novice writers.   Trust me: we are a sympathetic audience.  We are rooting for you.    Not everyone can win, this is true. But we appreciate each woman who takes the time to share her life with us through writing.
• Contest winners are held to higher standards than regular submissions.  Regular submissions go through a revision process, working with our editorial board to do at least three revisions, sometimes four, before we publish them. However, our contest winners are published as-is, with minor copyediting.   What this means for those who enter is that they need to take the time to send us the very best version possible. Publication-ready. Please, find someone who can see your writing clearly, and have them give you honest feedback.  Then revise.  Then find someone else, and get more feedback, and revise.  Then do it again, as many times as you can before the deadline.
• Do not be daunted if you have never published before! You don’t have to have published anything before to do well.  I speak from personal experience: “Finding Myself on Google,” which won an honorable mention in the 2006 essay contest, was the first essay I’d ever published.  I don’t think that’s true of our other winners, who had more writing experience than I did, but it’s true of me.  You can do this!
• If you’re wondering where to go with your next draft, and having a hard time finding a good editor, read the writing tips section of Segullah’s blog, and evaluate what you’ve got based on some of the ideas there.
• There is no theme for either contest (I’ve gotten that question a couple of times this year, so I wanted to clarify it).  Write about whatever you want that fits in our mission statement.  Read a few back issues to get some ideas of what we are looking for.
• If your essay doesn’t win, it still has a good chance of being published in Segullah after working through our editing process.  For me, one of the best things about my involvement in Segullah is finding people who will critique my writing with expertise, honesty, and kindness.  So if your essay doesn’t win, but it’s accepted for publication, that’s going to be good for your future writing.  You’ll have the chance to revise it under the guidance of one of our editors.  You’ll get published, and become a better writer.  Yeah, yeah, winning would have been better.  But this is pretty good, too.
• Follow the submissions guidelines I linked to above.  Pay attention to word count–our space is limited, and we’d hate to disqualify your essay from consideration because it was too long.

There you have it–behind the scenes at Segullah.  Now get writing!

p.s. I’m happy to answer any more questions you have about the contest in the comments section.

–Emily Milner, Assistant Editor, Segullah

A quick snippet:

“Editing is hardly ever what the non-inky world thinks it is, which is copyediting, which is merely the very last and easiest piece of editing—rather like a crossword puzzle, something you can do near-naked and beer in hand. Real editing means staying in touch with lots of writers, and poking them on a fairly regular basis about what they are writing and reading and thinking and obsessing about and what they have always wanted to write but haven’t, and also it means sending brief friendly notes to lots of writers you have never worked with yet in hopes that you will, and also it means listening to lots and lots of people about lots and lots of ideas, some or all of which might wend their way into your pages, and it means being hip to the zeitgeist enough to mostly ignore it, and it means reading your brains out, and it means always having your antennae up for what you might excerpt or borrow or steal, and it means tinkering with pieces of writing to make them lean and taut and clear, and always having a small room open in the back of your head where you mix and match pieces to see if they have any zest or magnetism together, and it means developing a third eye for cool paintings and photographs and drawings and sculptures and carvings that might elevate your pages, and writing captions and credits and titles and subheads and contents pages, and negotiating with and calming the publisher, and fawning at the feet of the mailing manager, and wheedling assistants and associates, and paying essayists more than poets on principle, and soliciting letters to the editor, and avoiding conferences and seminars, and sending the printer excellent bottles of wine on every holiday, including Ramadan and Kwanzaa, just in case.”

We at The Red Brick Store would like to point out that we do not do crossword puzzles (or copyediting) with a beer in hand. We much prefer Perrier. Also, we send Martinellis to our printers.