On Becoming An Editor

Anal or analysis?

I write for ILLUMINATION, but I’m also an editor here.

I submit my drafts to the editorial process, like any other writer. You know why?

Because no matter how much in love I am with my own writing, my nose has been pressed up tight against the words for the hours or days it took me to write the piece, and I cannot see the trees for the forest.

I know what I meant to say, but if I mentally sneezed or was distracted, or my keyboard randomly slipped into German, or whatever quantum seizures turned my perfect experience into something unexpected, then there may be a typo, a piece of work undone, or some little bit of fewmet left in my story that someone else will undoubtedly pick up, sniff, and gleefully tell me about, along with an implicit moral lecture on the topic of competence and diligence.

And it works

My fellow editors — like ILLUMINATION itself, they are a diverse and energetic lot — will look at my piece with fresh eyes, and if it needs a lick and a polish, they will politely tell me.

Much to my embarrassment, I forgot to caption a picture in a recent story and had to fix that up. There was also some resistance to the fabulous lead image I had selected and I went off to find one that wasn’t quite so nippy.

Everyone needs an editor. Or at least some new eyes on their writing. When I publish a story on Amazon’s Kindle platform, I’ll send it to a beta-reader group first, and incorporate their feedback in my published work that people pay actual money to read.

Even literary superstars like J K Rowling could use an editor. They get to the stage where anything they publish sells in the millions, and they think they can do no wrong. The end result is bloated, self-indulgent novels that sell as well as those that went before, but leave some of the readers wondering if their investment in time and money was worthwhile, and maybe they should leave the next one on the shelf.

Nobody pays me for this

ILLUMINATION receives hundreds of submissions a day. Each one must be approved by an editor, and there is often a significant amount of work and stress in the process. For example, dealing with a writer who thinks their story is perfect and the editor is just getting in the way — and ain’t it a fact that the worse the piece, the more adamant the writer is that it’s the bee’s knees?

It’s a slush pile. Patricia Chui, who has been a peripheral part of my literary life for many years, wrote the most delightfully funny — and scary — article about sorting through unsolicited submissions.

And she was getting paid for her adventures.

I’m not. I can spend hours of fairly intense time at my computer, endlessly clicking on the earliest draft in the queue, working diligently through it, and every few minutes there is an alert popping up that another writer has dropped another story on the slush mountain.

My salary? $0.00 and that’s before tax.

I could be doing other stuff. Like writing. I have one story that has earnt me a thousand dollars so far, and I’d love to do one of those every couple of hours.

Instead, I spend those two hours earning no cents at all, wading through unpublished submissions from writers who have the same dreams of being a millionaire* as I do.

…every would-be Frank McCourt with a manuscript in his drawer and an Oprah’s Book Club Pick in his dreams. I wish I could say that serving as a conduit between the publishing elite and the uncorrupted masses taught me valuable lessons in compassion and grace. Instead, it convinced me that the world is full of lunatics. — Patricia Chui

So why do I do it?

Not money. Nor the calm, life-affirming practical euphoria of creating something marvellous. Nor the desire to dominate these other writers who may be trying to bunt one past me.

I want to make a better world. That’s the guts of it.

Every writer is another human being, sparked by some miraculous desire to share their thought stuff with the world. Maybe they want a million readers to swoon over their poetry, or construct glittering careers from their sage advice.

Work until your bank account looks like a phone number — Britni Pepper

Medium lets anyone publish anything. Well, almost. There are limits. More on that later.

But there’s often a curious disconnect between what someone is saying and how they are saying it. Trust me, a stream-of-consciousness rant about Don Trump and his tax returns that stretches for fifteen pages without a paragraph break may have me nodding my head in agreement all the way through, but any sane reader is going to blanch after the first sentence and find something that won’t suck their soul into a black hole for a suggested: “20 minutes read”.

I want writers to be able to put their story into the best possible form to get the most readers. Often that involves slicing the thing into bite-size chunks, making a list out of a page of text, whacking in a couple of nifty graphics, finding some inspiring quotes, and following the same conventions of spelling and grammar that the rest of the English-speaking world has settled on.

I’m not being a prick if I tell you to run a spellchecker over your masterpiece

Honest. If I say such a hurtful thing, I’m not doing it to make you feel bad. It’s because your spelling is even rockier than mine, and that’s saying something. If Princess Fluffypants runs over my keyboard, it’s often an improvement.

I want your story to be the best it can be. There are times when the spelling is a moveable feast. Just crack open Mark Twain to see how that can work.

“Say, who is you? Whar is you? Dog my cats ef I didn’ hear sumf’n. Well, I know what I’s gwyne to do: I’s gwyne to set down here and listen tell I hears it agin.” -Miss Watson’s Jim

But if you are writing Six Sure-fire Rules for Business Success from the back of your Ford Pinto it helps immeasurably to use a dictionary to get everything just right.

The same for grammar. Honest, while spelling can be kind of random sometimes, and that goes double for me after an evening spent drunk Zooming, grammar has to be correct.

English doesn’t have much in the way of the case to help sort out what words are doing which jobs in a sentence. Is a noun the subject or the object or something else? Is “Man eating shark” the subject of a nightmare, or just dinner with chips?

Likewise verbs.

I’ve just hit five hundred followers

— Ouch!

English is a language that nobody ever has mastered. It has a monstrous vocabulary, arcane grammar out the wazoo, and each time you think you’ve got it sorted, you’re the epitome, some smart-arse like me will point out that’s not how you pronounce the word and didn’t you mean hyperbole, anyway?

It’s easier to spot someone else’s mistakes

That’s me. I’m coming in fresh. I don’t know what you mean. I've got to puzzle it out from what I see because I can’t wade through your mind to catch the true meaning. All I’ve got are the words you submitted.

Mistakes in spelling and grammar are the speedbumps in my path to understanding. They interrupt the flow of my reading, in a way that the writer doesn’t notice because they already have true understanding.

Everyone and I mean everyone — and I specifically mean you, buster — makes mistakes. Don’t worry about it. It’s human. If you don’t find and fix them, I’ll find them for you, and if there’s only one or two, I’ll be Miss Helpful and correct them for you, but if there are dozens, I’ll be Mother Grumpy and send you a snarky note that is politely worded, but it means you need to lift your game, buddy.

I’m doing it for your own good. I’m not getting paid to fix your errors but fixed they must be.

You the writer know what you mean to say. I the editor want to make sure the reader receives the same impression.

Here’s what happens

Every editor has a different process, and they do what works for them, but this is what I do.

I look at the list of submissions, sigh at its inordinate length, scroll down to the earliest draft and work on that.

1. Open a new window by clicking on the writer name. Unless I know the writer well, I want to know a bit about them. I look at their profile. What do they say about themselves? How long have they been in the program? How many followers? Do they have any social media links I can look at? What stories have they published? With what publications? How popular have they been?
2. Open a second new window for the draft. Now I know something about the writer, I can look at their work in context. A few, a blessed few, have been writing for years on Medium, they have huge follower counts, they know what they are doing, and I can accept that their work won’t need more than a skim over the main points. Others, maybe English isn’t their first language, maybe they have only been writing here for a few weeks, they need more of a hand to succeed.
3. Title, subtitle, and (maybe) kicker. Oh boy. Right here are the most important words in the whole story, and so many people bollix them up completely. Get the title right, and you are 90% of the way there. Seriously. You can have the best written, researched, illustrated, spellchecked and grammared piece of writing in the world, but on Medium if the title doesn’t draw in the reader, it’s not going to get read. If I ask you to put the title into title case, it’s because I want your story to get read, to get curated, to go viral. I want you to succeed. There are many stories on how to get your titles just right. Read them.
4. The images. These are another hurdle where many fall. The lead image is almost as crucial as the title in drawing readers. Get a good one and people will click just to see it large, and maybe stay for the words that follow. I check that the image is one we can use, and not just lifted from somewhere on the internet. The free Unsplash images that Medium makes searchable and easily plugged in are almost foolproof, but they have the disadvantage that so many use them that they can become boring. Ideally, I want to see a clickable link to the image source, the creator, and the license. If you just drop an image in with nothing underneath, your piece won’t be published until you fix it. If I think an image is lifted from somewhere it shouldn’t be, I’ll do a Tineye or Google reverse image search to find out where else it has been used.
5. Sad to say, but I’ve been burnt enough times with plagiarists that I’m always suspicious of a new writer. It’s hard to say, but some things about a writer’s account and their story will send up alarm flares, and I’ll copy the text into a plagiarism checker. Maybe I’ll just copy the most eye-catching phrase in the story and Google it to see if it comes from somewhere else. There are rules about cites and fair comment and quotes, but if you lift someone else’s work and pretend it’s your own, I’m going to at least put a hold on the story until it’s fixed, and quite possibly boot you off ILLUMINATION, report you to Medium, salt your fields and spit on your rug, no matter how well it ties the room together. Be warned.
6. Once I’ve got the easy things out of the way, I’ll begin by actually reading some of the stories. I have Grammarly permanently loaded, and it puts a red underline on grammar errors or misspellings. No matter how wonderful your topic, if all I see is a sea of red, I’m going to ask you to fix it. Some writers are new to writing or don’t have English as their first language. Fair enough. English is a beast to learn. But it’s not my job to teach it to you. It’s yours to tame the beast and make it perform tricks.
7. The primary way we editors communicate with writers is via private notes. It’s a limited system, not perfect, but it’s all Medium gives us. ILLUMINATION has a Slack channel, where we can discuss things — in private if need be — and that’s always useful. But if I want to make an improvement in a story, I’ve got 200 characters to do it in, so if I seem terse, that’s why.
8. Once a story looks good, I’ll publish it. in the process, I’ll check the keywords so that it will fit into one of our internal categories, and it will stand a chance at curation. Occasionally I’ll find a story without keywords. Don’t do this! Keywords improve visibility and get your stories to the most likely readers. You only get five, so pick them wisely. If I see a story with fewer than five keywords, I’ll either pick one out of the air or send it back to you to fix.
9. When it’s published, I’ll often clap, leave a comment, tweet it, or otherwise express my approval. If I don’t, it doesn’t mean I think the thing is dismal but meets the basics. It might mean I’m rushed with a truckload of new submissions delivered onto the pile in the five minutes I’ve spent on your masterpiece.

Why we edit

It’s for your benefit to have the best stories in the best format, and ours so we have a publication full of great content.

We’ll publish stories we don’t agree with if we think they make a good point or will spark discussion — there’s been at least one story I’ve published which I’ve immediately dropped a long rebuttal on to; I’m a snarky bitch when the wind is in the wrong quarter — but we have some firm limitations.

Medium has its own rules, and they are serious about writers following them. If we spot you breaking one of Medium’s rules, we’ll nip that in the bud before they get to look at it. Publish privately at your peril!

And we’d love, love, love for your story or poem or essay to be curated or go viral. Read the curation guidelines and give them serious thought.

ILLUMINATION has some foundational principles, and we’re serious about them: Diversity, Synergy, Fusion, Serendipity. What they mean is that together we create magic.

Why I edit

All of the above.

And I get to read a truckload of great stories. My mate Patricia the slushpile editor might be sifting for the rare gems, but the stories submitted here are, by and large, all diamonds. They just need a little polishing sometimes.

There’s a certain smugness in being the class monitor, I’ll admit. I can tell even established and successful writers that they said “their” when they really should have used “there”, and they just have to take it, because they screwed up and I noticed, so they’re!

But you know what really lights my candle?

It’s that I am forced to read a range of stories, poems, essays, and diatribes on a wide variety of topics written by people of diverse ages, backgrounds, nationalities, and skills.

I learn a hell of a lot, and I consider a range of opinions, and I find out things I wouldn’t normally. I’m a culture junkie, and I delight in filling up the unused portions of my mind with information that I can trot out when needed.

I never know what the next entry on the ILLUMINATION draft pile will bring. Maybe it will be something that will have me questioning my will to live as I grapple with the smug self-assurance of a scam artist who thinks copyright is optional, their command of English can’t be bettered, and the volunteer editor is a ball to kick around for amusement.

But mostly it’s someone who has poured their heart into a poem, or an article, and genuinely wants the world to read it and be a loftier place afterwards. I get a lot of mileage out of authentic voices doing their best and wanting to be better.

And it doesn’t have to be deathless prose, or numinous spirituality, or stirring invocations to civic duties. If you love birdwatching, or quilting, or pulling the wings off flies, write about what you love.

I’ll read it, enjoy it, and maybe fix your grammar.

Britni

*Well, I am a millionaire. Anybody who owns a house in my particular Melbourne suburb is camped on a piece of dirt worth at least a million, regardless of whatever crumbling pile of books, bricks, dust and dreams that happen to be sitting on top of it. I just want the income and the yachts and the fabulous sex life that one usually associates with the term.