I <3 Editors.

[bodlon]

Does anybody else do a little dance when edits come in?

I do. A lot. Granted, that little dance has to happen in my head if I get them when the e-mails arrive when I'm in public, but it's a little dance all the same.

It's strange, because I can remember a time when I was deeply uncomfortable letting anybody see a work I felt was unfinished. This was coupled, I think, with having internalized the attitude of editors being malicious gatekeepers who thrived on corrupting pure creative vision.

Which, as we all know at this point, is bunk. Understandable bunk rooted in insecurity and weird ideas about art, but still bunk.

It was fan culture that brought me around to the idea of having an editor/beta reader. For the first time, I was a part of community that encouraged peer editing, and considered editorial polishing a virtue rather than a sign of weakness.

It still took a leap of faith to dip my toes in. I started with close friends, and then moved on to making friends with folks who liked my work and had a good rep with a red pen. By the time I was sending things out to paying original markets, I'd built up enough confidence to show my writing to strangers and enough perspective to handle the range of possible responses.

These days, working with a good editor gives me a buzz not unlike the one I'd get in school working with a good teacher. It's a relationship with someone I can trust who wants to make my work better. I improve, and my work improves.

Do I fear the possibility of bad editors? Sure. I've had experiences with people who appear to edit in anger, or who aren't as skilled as they probably ought to be. I've worked with people I wished were more organized or more forthright, though I can say in full honesty that I'm still That Guy more often than I should be. And really, none of those folks were genuinely malign. I learned as much from those particular bouts of well-intentioned fumbling around as I have with people who are precise, communicative, well-organized badassess. Some of those lessons were about how not to do things, but other times I've learned useful things about patience, damage control, and asking for the things I need.

More and more, I think I'm learning that writing requires me to be brash enough to believe that my stories deserve to be told, but humble enough to know that writing for an audience also means that things don't always spring from my head in a fully-effective, comprehensible way.

Writing is oracular work, and sometimes you need a priest on hand to translate.

~*~

- Dormice! Who doesn't like a good dormouse?

- An amazing video for "Space Girl" by The Imagined Village. I might have choked up a bit at the bits with Liz Sladen in.

- Another BBC photo feature: who doesn't love a bit of experimental archaeology? I feel like I need a bigger yard.

- Every so often an XKCD strip appears in my RSS reader and I stare at it in a sort of stunned horror because it says something that's been sitting in my skull for ages, unarticulated. This is one of them.

- Did you know: at least one person in Kentucky believes that the Bible says you can kick gay people out of a public swimming pool?

This post has been mirrored from Christian A. Young's Dimlight Archive. To see it in its original format, visit dimlightarchive.com