Throw a bunch of wet spaghetti at the wall. See what sticks. Who knew that the thing your parents told you not to do as a kid would be vital to your mental stability as an adult? And would be vital to my job as an editor.
I have been editing this website for about six months. And before that I was editing a different website for about six months. In the last five years I have been the editor for dozens of writers, many of them quite young, none of them experienced.
So I want to talk for a moment about what it means to me to edit someone’s writing.
As a Writer I Still have Hangups. As an Editor, I am not Afraid of Anything.
The first step is not letting things faze me. Don’t get me wrong. I care very deeply about my writers as people. And I care very deeply about taking whatever it is they’ve written and running it through the mystery-machine until it comes out the other side as a finished piece of writing. (The mystery machine is usually a lot of back-and-forth editing, revising, discussing. I may write an article on that maddening alchemy another time.) But other matters? Matters outside of the mystery machine elicit one of three responses:
- Let’s talk about it.
- Let’s talk about it after the deadline.
- Um… Let’s not go there.
Adam, I’m feeling really crappy about this article. It’s not coming together the way I want it to.
Ok. Let’s talk about it.
Your mindset may not directly pertain to your writing. But you do need some kind of confidence to write. As your editor, I will never doubt you. I will trust that if we can talk through a problem, we can get you through that problem. And get you back to writing (assuming that’s the goal).
Adam, I feel like this gets into a larger discussion. But that means I have to include all of that in this essay!
That’s not what that means. Finish this essay. Let’s talk about the larger implications after you finish this piece as planned. At some point you have to stop writing. The desire for everything to be perfect will prevent you from finishing. And then where will you be? You’ll have half a perfect essay (or novel or whatever) which is not as good as having a whole piece of writing that is… good enough. There comes a point when the dissertation writer has read the last article that will appear in their citations. And there comes a point when the novelist has added their last scene, their last character, etc.
Adam, I don’t even know if I’m a good writer. Will anyone read this? Will anyone like this? Am I just fooling myself?
So what? You like writing. Other people (myself included) like reading your writing. Why would you burden yourself unnecessarily with these sorts of thoughts? What do they help you do besides fret? Give yourself a break. It’s okay to feel vulnerable. Putting your writing out there is a humbling experience. And that’s okay.
It’s not Clairvoyance. Just Experience.
That’s a big part of what I do, actually. I’ve written a book of sorts (my dissertation) and I’m armpits-deep in another one. Plus dozens of essays for this and other websites. Plus countless rewrites and writer’s meetings. I’m an old enough hand that at some point I made the conscious decision not to listen to the devil-on-my-shoulder telling me I’ll never be a good enough writer. He’s still there on my shoulder, though. And so I’ve developed strategies for shutting him the hell up. These are strategies I am happy to share with my writers.
So a big part of my job is just to be a windup doll that says endless variations on: It’s ok. You’ll get through this. It’s part of the process. Being an editor means saying the same things again and again in lots of different ways. Sometimes I think I don’t need to be there at all. A voice-generator would do just fine. You could program it to say: “You’ll get through this. You’ll get through this.” Over and over.
So does the repetition make my work meaningless? Make my words meaningless? I don’t think so.
A lot of writers have actually talked about this issue at great length. The novel Evgeny Onegin deals with it quite explicitly: that (assuming a base-level of financial comfort… not a safe assumption, unfortunately, for most people) you have a choice in life: bored or miserable. For years I resisted being bored and so I was miserable. Now that I’ve embraced the routine of being an editor, I find it’s not boring. Not all repetition is boring. Not least because I get to do the number one thing, which is edit. People entrust me with their innermost thoughts at a stage when those thoughts are often too fragile to survive in the outside world. I’m like a NICU doctor for writing. It’s fabulous.
An Editor who Hasn’t been there Can’t Lead Someone
I don’t think I could be this bastion of mental stability for other writers if I hadn’t been in some pretty dark places myself. As recently as three years ago, I had sunk a decade or so into my grad degree. I didn’t know if I was going to graduate. I didn’t know what I was going to do with myself if I did graduate. And finally, after a bit of therapy and psychopharmacology and just plain friends and relatives giving me a shoulder to cry on, I finished my dissertation. I defended it. Then my family and I went to a really tasty Punjabi restaurant.
That was December 2019. By the time I defended my dissertation, the first COVID case had been reported in China. In late February of the following year (2020) we started hearing more and more insistent reports of its spread. First throughout China. Then Italy. By the time I came back from my niece’s Bat Mitzvah in Florida (March first or thereabouts), it was everywhere.
The little boost to my mental health that allowed me to finish my dissertation in autumn and winter of 2019 was not of the permanent variety. It was like a shot of cortisone in a baseball player’s elbow. It was enough to keep me going but not a permanent solution.
Leaving the Academy
Ironically, the permanent solution came during the COVID pandemic. I made the decision to leave academia. That’s an essay unto itself, but suffice it to say I stopped believing in the mission and I stopped believing in my part in it. I found (temporary) financial stability as a contact tracer. I started writing for pleasure, something I’d stopped doing a couple of years earlier. Then I started sharing my work with a small group of people. Finally with a larger group as I began publishing in this format.
The point is that up until the COVID pandemic all-but forced this course of action on me, I had been trying the same old things because other people had said they would work.
There are lots of examples of this kind of thinking in my life, but I’ll go with the most obvious one; the simplest one. Academia. Just try a little harder. Stay up a little later. Organize your thoughts a little better. I don’t want to play the game of wondering what would have happened if I had had resources in my undergrad or grad school years to address my particular cocktail of neuro-atypical traits. I just know I didn’t have those resources. So continuing to pursue one of the quickly disappearing jobs in the field of academia was starting to feel like hitting my head against the wall. No, it had always felt like that. But early in 2020, I started to think that hitting my head against a wall might not be a good idea.
The Boiled Frog
Was there a single moment of truth? For others who leave academia, perhaps. But not for me. It was rather that I woke up one day and decided that I was the boiled frog. Even apart from the fact that academia no longer delivers what it promises; the fact that the tenure-track jobs are drying up like the Dead Sea; that academics who have tenure-track jobs are leaving in droves because the conditions are just so demeaning… I personally wasn’t going to be happy with a job in academia. So the expectation, the hope, that someday I would was ultimately doing one thing: keeping me depressed and unhappy.
By contrast, leaving academia made me less depressed and less unhappy. And that little ray of light was just enough to let me go from surviving to living. And I had enough left over to empower my writers; to call them one or more times a week. To encourage them to greater and greater acts of creativity and self-confidence. Perhaps most importantly, to be their first and most enthusiastic reader. People need that kind of feedback. I certainly did. The times I didn’t get it (the later grad school years) are the times I look back to with the most sadness and compassion for my younger self. The times I did get that enthusiastic, supportive feedback (the tail end of my dissertation writing, the two years since) have been the happiest and most confident and least lonely of my life. So I want to give that feeling to other people.
Editor of Wet Spaghetti… Spaghetditor?
Throw a bunch of wet spaghetti at the wall. See what sticks. It sounds easy, in theory. But think about what that actually entails. You get an idea. You work out some of the details. Maybe you even start writing. It doesn’t go well. You try to rework it a couple of times. You go back and forth with your editor.
It’s just not working. At this point you’re getting upset. Frustrated. Starting to despair. It’s been a few days. Meanwhile, you have a job and other responsibilities. Deadlines are approaching. You allow yourself to move on to a new idea. Now you have to go through the same process. Will this one work? Will it catch fire to the point where it feels like it’s writing itself? Ugh… will there be massive amounts of research involved? Will the project feel like you have to carry it the whole way, or drag it behind you?
Editor = Cheerleader
It’s not easy. You might have a day where, in theory, you know you are a good writer… but you can’t bring yourself to believe in what you’re writing. You can’t bring yourself to believe in the process.
It is an unfortunate and cruel truth that the people who make it as writers are not necessarily the ones who write the best plots or construct the best characters or weave the best arguments. They’re the ones who have confidence in the process. Enough to make mistakes. Enough to keep going.
And if you are just starting out, you probably don’t have that confidence. And if you have suffered physical or mental issues for some or all of your life, you might also not have that confidence. If you’re from a historically marginalized group. If you’re writing in a non-native language. Or you have a physical disability that keeps you from writing very often. A job, a spouse, kids… all of these things keep you from writing. And all of these things make your voice all the more important when you do find it. It’s so easy to forget how much we need your voice. We need to lend you the confidence you don’t yet possess. So if you can’t find your own confidence, then you need the next best thing: a cheerleader. And for now, that’s me.
