A question my students regularly ask is, what do you do if a story is accepted, but you disagree with changes proposed by the editor?
What they’re often really asking is, “If I want my work published, my choices are either withdraw the story, or go along with all the edits, no matter what, right?”
No, writers. No. Most editors — and all of the good ones — want a collaborator. They don’t want divas — writers who believe their every word is precious and sacred. But neither do they want to work with people who swallow their thoughts, just to get the byline.
But don’t take my word for it.
Recently, I attended an “Evening With the Editors” hosted by Hippocampusmagazine, and all six editors on the panel agreed that they prefer to work with writers who are open to change, but who will speak up when an edit will hurt their work more than help it.
“As a writer, I’ve had editors introduce errors into my work, [so] I definitely encourage writers to push back, said DW McKinney, an editor of Shenandoah literary magazine. “We want to make sure the integrity of the piece is up to your standards.”
The integrity of the story is key, McKinney said, to deciding when to be open to change, and when to say no. As important as it is to defend your work, it’s just as important to listen to the editor trying to make it better.
“We are especially tender with our authors because we know when we make suggestions it might be difficult,” said Kristine Langley Mahler, director of the independent publisher Split/Lip Press. “So in our acceptance letter, we’ll say, ‘Would you be open to having a conversation about this?’ We don’t want to have an author under contract, and then…have the author go, ‘I don’t want to do that.’ ”
And then, a really interesting thing happened. Rae Pagliarulo, flash editor at Hippocampus, and Hattie Fletcher, editor at Short Reads, started talking about the back-and-forth they had when Fletcher accepted an essay by Pagliarulo.
After eight years of rejection, Pagliarulo was thrilled to find a home for her story. Still, she felt a bit rattled when she first read through Fletcher’s notes.
“A lot of the suggestions you made,” Pagliarulo said, “were stylistic choices I wasn’t married to, but I felt they set my work apart.”
“Flash hinges on really specific images, a word, a turn, and sometimes editing is about clarifying that turn, that image,” Fletcher said. “It’s gem polishing.”
“But then when I read through your edits, I realized what I wanted the piece to convey remained perfectly intact,” Pagliarulo said. “I realized there was not as much intentionality behind those choices as I had originally assumed.”
“You could have pushed back on some of those if you wanted,” Fletcher said. “These are works of the heart. A foundational principle for editing is finding and preserving that heart.”
Kelly Caldwell
Dean of Faculty