Becoming Editable

If you aspire to write for publication, you'll need to practice the art of becoming editable—a vulnerable space somewhere between humility and self-advocacy.

Ravynn’s tiny Lego typewriter

You may not write with the intention of having an audience outside of yourself, but if you do, you’ll need to figure out what your relationship to editing is—especially when another person is editing your work. It’s nerve-wracking business when you’re beginning to share your work with others: it feels a little like sending your pride and joy off to have both arms and a foot hacked off. (Graphic, sorry!) There is nothing quite like the initial sinking feeling of opening a pages long edit letter or a manuscript document that has hundreds of comments to resolve. Even when you know, in your heart of hearts, this process is meant to strengthen and sharpen your story, most authors I know have some sort of ritual around handling their edits when they come in. (Or, I should say, their feelings around the edits.)

Both as someone who is a writer that had to learn to this skill and now literary magazine editor who practices it from the other side, I know that to be editable requires vulnerability on your part and a trust of your editor. If you’re just starting out, you may not have that trusting relationship with your editor yet, so you must build one.

Often, writers may fall into one of two extremes when they’re given edits. In media, we’re confronted with the image of the obstinate writer, who refuses edits out of skepticism that their editor knows what they’re doing, pride that won’t allow them to have another person touch their precious words, or paranoia that someone is trying to distort their message. This image occurs in part because it creates obvious tension and a conflict between parties that can move the plot along. On the opposite end: you get the acquiescing writer that tends to accept all the edits, no questions asked, even if you have some hang ups or misgivings. You might think you’re keeping the peace or trying to preserve the relationship with your editor by moving this way, but let me offer a perspective on editing that asks you to find a space somewhere in the middle of these two positions.

The point of editing is to work with an editor in service of a closely aligned vision for your story. You two should be on the same team. (Asterisk, because I can think of many times where you might not be.) This means your responsibility as a writer is to be attuned enough to your work well enough that you can articulate to your editor what you are trying to do. Once your editor understands your vision based on reads of your piece and any additional context you may add, your job becomes thinking of the editorial process as a push-and-pull. You accept edits you feel align with your vision, ask questions to better understand places you feel don’t match your goals, and stand firm on things that are non-negotiables. (But you have to know which things those are!) Ultimately, you and your editor are in the journey toward a sharper text together, and you should be able to trust their judgment but also confidently advocate for yourself where necessary, finding the balance between those two.

To this end, it is so important to seek out editors whose editorial style and philosophy you jive with. Someone you feel you can communicate with.

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Some tips for getting comfortable with being edited:

1. Be curious. Approach edits with an air of curiosity. How does this suggestion solve a problem?

2. Be communicative. You’re talking about the text with your editor through the comments. Lean into that.

3. Practice. Send lower stakes work out to work with different editors to see different editorial styles and find out what you like in an editor. This can be really important before you decide to do an entire book project that takes years to complete.

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A few notes…

On Practice

Before I published my debut, Love Requires Chocolate, I published in magazines quite a bit. I was in graduate school, getting my Ph.D. in American Studies, and while I was doing a lot of writing and publishing there, I wasn’t being edited in the same way I was writing for magazines. (For more on my short writing visit www.ravynnkstringfield.com/writing)

I found lots of places to publish from 2019-2024, but Catapult (RIP to a real one) was one of my favorite spots to be edited. I worked with at least four different editors at the magazine, who each had different editorial styles. One was sharp and blunt, requiring several passes on my piece with an extreme level of detail down to each word, but I came to understand that he was serious about what my piece could be and wanted me to act like it, too. Another tended to ask a lot of questions about my piece. She didn’t offer many explicit directions for what I could do, but rather would identify a place that wasn’t working, tell me why, and suggest a few ways that would solve the problem, but ultimately leave me to smooth out the patch myself. My essay drafts came back marked up from first to last word, but very few of my other published pieces shine as bright as those I wrote for Catapult.

Because of my experience with around a dozen or so different editors over the course of my writing career, I know that as a writer, I work best when not everything is a question. I prefer a mix of direct suggestions for smoother work and when things might really change my meaning, a series of questions. As an editor, I tend to work that way, too. My edits tend to be mostly direct suggestions and a few well-positioned questions. I might come across sharper than I mean to in editorial work, if only because I’m trying to be concise and articulate. The more words I need to explain an edit, I risk losing clarity on what precisely it is I want from my writer. Still, I try to frame my edits as suggestions, starting many of my comments with “Consider X” or “Perhaps try X for clarity” (a lot of my more gentle editorial phrasings are inherited from the one piece Nicole Chung edited me on).

Having some sense of my relationship to editing before I launched into publishing book length projects was probably one of the best things that could have happened to me. It ensured I had a general understand of what the process would look like/mean—and that I wouldn’t pass out when I got that manuscript with 600+ comments. (Heh.)

On Power Dynamics

There is also an undeniable power dynamic to being edited that can easily be abused. Your editor is the gatekeeper to your access to publication. It can feel like the path of least resistance is to keep your editor happy so you don’t ruin your chances of making it to the finish line with your piece. And this is complicated by various factors like race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, disability, class. Let’s use race differentials as an example. If you’re a Black writer, this might mean you may have to fight with a white editor (or often a copy editor) to make sure the B in Black when referring to Black Americans is capitalized in your text. It seems like a small battle, but can be exhausting when you have the fight over and over again. On a larger scale, it may mean that your editor doesn’t understand why a scene needs to invoke a conversation about system racism, when on the surface, it looks and feels like an interpersonal conflict. They may try to convince you that having this type of conflict in your book may change its ability to sell or its place in the market.

This is why it’s so important to be clear on what’s important to you and what kind of language is non-negotiable—and why.

My second novel, Love in 280 Characters or Less, is a digital epistolary. It’s told through blog posts, texts, tweets, and emails. Though the format was a huge complicating factor in my submission process, I was didn’t want to change it because I felt the digital storytelling was crucial to Sydney’s story—it just wasn’t a quirky detail. I was trying to ask questions, in part, about what it meant to be a Black writer in a time when anyone had access to a platform online and what it means to come of age online. So I wanted the format to stay, even though I will admit, I had several moments where I jumped at the chance to edit it to be more prose based if it meant I could be published.

I’m fortunate that none of those opportunities worked out because the book I am publishing in April is the book I intended to write. It does what I wanted it to do. Is it perfect? No, but it accurately captures what I sought out to do at the moment it was conceptualized. It took me quite a while to really be able to stand firm on that, and I had to be tested to get clear on it, but once I was, it made for a much smoother editorial process for me.

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I hope you enjoy my somewhat scattered thoughts on learning to become editable. Here’s to having the confidence to start sharing you work, the trust necessary to entrust folks who are committed to sharpening your work with those words, and the strength to set boundaries around what that work is and is not, all while having faith that the process will create something better than you could have ever imagined.

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Reading

I love this piece from Melina Moe at LitHub about the rejection letters Toni Morrison sent out when she was an editor at Random House. Evergreen reading.