Favorite Quotations
Found Rant
(Swiped Off the Hard Drive of a Hardworking Editor)
Dear Author,
Now that I have liked your story and told you I do, now that I have suggested places where you might smooth or polish it, we are at the beginning of a classic dialogue—author and editor—and I have some thoughts about how we can make it go easy on us both.
1. Try to remember, I like what you wrote and probably will like it more and more as we proceed.
2. All I know about you is your text, and all the readers of our journal will know about you is your text. The text is your only voice.
3. When I tell you what I felt and learned from your text, that is all I am telling you—my own response. You cannot disagree with me because it is my response, although you might go back to your text to try to figure out how I felt or learned something you do not remember putting in there, and question how I missed what you thought was there.
4. After you read and think about what I have to say, I hope you will go back to your text and decide whether and how to change it, and when you’re ready, send me a new version. Then I will read it again.
5. If you ask where in the text I felt or learned something, I will answer as well as I can.
6. If you tell me what I felt and learned was not true, then I will try to remain silent. The only thing I want to read is your revised text, not your arguments presented in some separate text. We will not publish your emails, only your text.
7. If you tell me something in your text really happened just the way you wrote it, or that your text is a political statement, or that you don’t want readers to understand your text, or that you have been published in The New Yorker, I will delete that email and wait for a new version of the text.
8. If you tell me every lick of your text is immutable, I will sadly decide not to publish your story.
9. After a few back and forths, we are likely to succeed—your story published in our journal.
10. Let’s succeed.
Carol Peters
Fiction Editor
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EIC's Note: Is that what's bothering you, Binky?"
