A Letter to the Editors

I'll start this off with two statements for those who want to write fiction for publication. It's sort of a good news/bad news observation:

- The bad news is, you're going to have to deal with editors.

- The good news is, that's not really bad news. Most of those dealings are PPP: pleasant, painless, and productive.

As I've gotten older and more stubborn, I guess I probably argue with editors more than I used to, but it's still not often. The main reason I don't argue is that almost all the editors of short-fiction publications I've dealt with are competent and kind and open-minded, and certainly know more than I do about their job and their readers and what they want. 

A second reason is, I'd like to try to please them as much as possible. All editors strive to publish the best stories and writers they can find, and they're especially happy when those writers are easy to work with. If an editor and I disagree on something in one of my stories, I always ask myself whether it's something worth arguing about. If it is, we discuss it, but if it's not (and it's usually not), I salute and do it the way the editor wants it done. Why not? After all, he (or she, in most cases) is the boss, and--to quote someone wiser than I am--"Those who play too hard to get, don't get got."

Besides, losing an editorial argument about something in the content of your story isn't always a complete reversal of what you wanted. It can be a compromise. Just rewrite that part until both of you can agree.

I realize that what I'm saying here isn't anything new; it's mostly common sense. But I'll try to illustrate some of it with ten examples from my own so-called writing career. And I'd love to hear about some of your experiences as well. 

1. I once wrote, in a submission to a mystery magazine, that a character "cut his eyes at" another character. The editor of that story pointed it out, and asked what I meant by that expression. I explained it, because Southern folks have been cutting their eyes at each other for as long as I can remember, but the editor was still in doubt, so I happily surrendered and changed the wording to "glanced at" or something equally anemic. That satisfied her. (But I did cut my eyes at that email several times before sending it.)

2. In a submitted story to a time-travel anthology in 2019, I wrote something about the current value of a treasure-trove of money that had been stolen many years earlier. I've forgotten the specifics, but I was dead wrong in the calculations, and the editor of the anthology caught my error, and I corrected it. In fact I very thankfully corrected it. It's bad enough to show one's ignorance and carelessness to an editor--Barb Goffman, in this case--but at least Barb was a longtime friend. It would've felt a lot worse to have made a fool of myself in front of the readers, which I would've done if Barb hadn't caught my mistake.

3. In the Weird Things That'll Never Happen Again department, the editor of a weekly magazine phoned me one morning and said she needed a July Fourth holiday-mystery story, and needed it fast. When I asked how fast, she said, "The deadline for the new issue is tomorrow." I didn't know if I could do it, but I also knew that if I could, I'd have an "in" at that magazine for the foreseeable future. I wrote the story, submitted it that night, and it was published three days later. I'm not sure how many brownie points I earned, or if I earned any at all, but it never hurts to go the extra mile if you can. I try to do the same for anthology editors who find they need a story at the last minute to cover an author who dropped out of the project.

4. I long ago submitted a mystery story about a robbery and kidnapping, caught on camera, of a character I had named Ron McGraw, and I titled the story "Take the Money and Ron," which I modestly thought was brilliant. As it turned out, the editor didn't like my title--but she didn't tell me so. She just changed it, to "Candid Camera." I still think my title was a lot better, but hey, sometimes that's just how the mop flops. I kept my silence and cashed my check. 

5. I think I've told the following story before, but it shows how flexible and cooperative editors can be. The first mystery I ever submitted to Strand Magazine featured a revenge-murder caused by a poison which I said was "a fluid from the oscolio blossoms of eastern Africa." Shortly after submission, I was surprised to receive a phone call from editor Andrew Gulli. He said they were considering my story, but no one on their staff was familiar with that poison, and were wondering where I had found out about it. I told him, very honestly, "I made it up." He said, "You what?" I said, again, "I made it up." There was a long, long silence on the phone, and finally he said, "Okay." And they published the story a month later.

6. Editor Linda Landrigan at AHMM once suggested that I change the ending of one of my submitted stories because it was "too abrupt." She was exactly right. I agreed with her and added a final plot twist, essentially creating a second ending on top of the first, and both of us were happy. That story, "The Blue Wolf," appeared in their February 2000 issue, and since then I've sold a lot of stories--some of them to AHMM--that featured a second or even a third ending after what appeared to be the first ending. That helpful technique is only one of the many things I've learned from Linda over the years.

7. In one of my stories in the print edition of The Saturday Evening Post, I mentioned that a character's horse was a mare and, about three pages later, I said something like "he unhitched him and rode away." Him? Rode him away? Unfortunately, the Post editors didn't catch that inconsistency any more than I did, and the first I heard of it was when one of my writer friends read it in the magazine and emailed me to point out my error. It was too late to fix it, and I still remember my reaction, which was something like Good God what was I thinking? I hope confession really is good for the soul, because it hurts to admit I made such a stupid mistake. It's one of those cases where I wish the SEP editors had been harder on me.

8. Back in the early 2000s, Woman's World published a story of mine under the wrong byline. I found out about it when a guy on the East Coast contacted me via my website to say he had read a lot of my mystery stories, and the one in the latest WW issue sounded like my writing, but the published byline said it was written by someone else. "Do you also write under the name Elizabeth Hawn?" he asked me. I assured him that I had never used a pseudonym of any kind, and when I contacted the editor about it--the late Johnene Granger, she said the person who put together the issue screwed up and inserted a previous author's name. She was clearly upset about the mixup, but I told her it didn't bother me--I had already been paid and it wasn't that big a deal. The funny thing was, it happened again about a year later (can you spell "Rodney Dangerfield"?), and again the story was credited to Elizabeth Hawn and the editor apologized profusely. (I've always intended to search the mysterious Ms. Hawn out and tell her about the switcheroo, but I never got around to it.) The point of all this is, publishing mistakes happen, and sometimes it's just pilot error. What good would it have done to complain about it?

9. About ten years ago, not long after I had preached to the students in my fiction-writing class about the dangers of overusing substitutes for "said" and explanatory "ly" adverbs during dialogue, a certain magazine published a story I had submitted to them that included the sentence "Of course not," he said. Except that in the final, printed version they had changed that sentence, without telling me, to "Of course not," he protested sharply. Again, I didn't bother to complain to the editor about it--the horse was already out of the barn--but I was tempted to. What they'd done was take a perfectly good sentence and turn it into a piece of truly bad writing. (Picture Tony Soprano sighing, shrugging, and saying "Whattayagonnado?")

10. I once wrote a long Western story that featured a group of masked bandits robbing a stagecoach. In one part of the story, a deaf passenger who could read lips "heard" something important that was said by one of the bandits. A sharp-eyed editor pointed out that the passenger couldn't possibly have read the guy's lips because of the bandanna covering his nose and mouth--which was of course correct. I was embarrassed enough to crawl under my writing desk, but when I came out, I corrected the story as needed and it was published--in fact it was serialized in three consecutive issues. All because of a good editor.

FYI, I listed these experiences because most of them are unusual enough to stand out in my memory, but in truth, almost all my contacts with editors have been short and uneventful and pleasant. Because most editors are themselves pleasant. They work in different ways: Some are extremely "hands-on," getting down into the trenches with (usually) helpful opinions on everything from structure to grammar to punctuation, etc.--and others are not. Both AHMM and EQMM have always surprised me in that almost all my stories there have been published with no edits at all, at least none that I was aware of, and with little or no discussions between writer and editor. The Strand, to a certain degree, is that way also. My takeaway from that, which might or might not be correct, is that if these three magazines receive a story that does require a great deal of editing, it's likely to be rejected on the spot. Which is even more incentive to us writers, to try to send them only our very best work.

I'll close with one more observation. As mentioned, I've had many conversations about content with the editors of publications, sometimes resulting in changes and sometimes not. But in every case, whether I won or lost the argument, I appreciated the editor's attention to and questioning of those kinds of things. Once again, these editors want the same thing I do, and that is to make a particular story as good and believable as it can be.

What about the experiences, good and bad, that you've had with the editors of anthologies, collections, magazines, and such? Or, for that matter, novels? Were you always satisfied with the result of your discussions with the editor? Are you usually in agreement? Did they usually help your story? Can you recall any really wild situations? Were differences ever extreme enough to lead to your withdrawing a story or other project from consideration, or to your not submitting work again to that publication?

 

Here's to a successful, profitable, and edit-free fall and winter!