What We Can Learn About Editing (and Life) From a Book on Writing

This post is based off of an assignment I completed for the graduate copyediting class I took in spring 2015. The idea was to distill the essence of a chosen writing or editing book into a clear, concise, creative essay. The footnote covers it also, but due to the nature of the assignment, typical methods of quote attribution were discouraged. I only used about three direct quote tidbits of any kind, and the rest is paraphrasing or—gasp!—my own views.

“Prufrock’s Crab” and “Colo-rectal Theology”:^[1]
The Delicate Balance Between Writing and Death^[2]

Every childhood is comprised of a thousand and one stories, and writing starts from those memories. At its messiest and most vivid, it begins as an ungainly sprawl and greases its way through your own puberty, until each piece is rewritten into its adult draft. No story springs fully formed from the writer, even the best ones—if it does, that writer probably lacks a rich inner life—and the process may be like extracting your own ingrown toenail with a dull knife. Rereading may be even more painful, as painful as the first wincing meal you tried to eat after getting braces, drawing choked breaths in the school cafeteria and knowing that you’re the only seven-year-old with teeth so crooked they couldn’t wait for the awkwardness of puberty before attaching medieval torture devices to your teeth. Awareness of your differences is the fucking key, even if you realize you do scuttle around like Prufrock’s crab.

This is where a writer starts, in the small details and the short assignments. Cringing is for later, and publication maybe later still or never. New writing students always want to know the route to publication; they want the writing instructor to hold the lantern for them while they scrabble in the dirt. And she does, but she sees and she shows them the gold among the muck, the reason for writing that isn’t always so others can see it. The suffering and flailing and puking of the successful or not-successful writers who have gone before. And yes, the lack of perfection—perfection is the tool of the oppressor, the damning weight of doubt and neuroses. The urge to be seen, acknowledged, deserving and earned of affection feeds the neuroses and the narcissistic urges that lead to colo-rectal theology, a back-and-forth loop that can only return the same quality it originally put out.

By necessity and lack of other employable skills, writers should listen, observe, watch, absorb—they can be sponges, mirrors, unknown spycams, but they are not the dancer on the stage, performing art in the moment where an audience is necessary. In their lonesome, writers can process and create, cobble together the shitty first draft by sieving their observances through their own experiences. Yet writing is not always the solitary task you might wish it to be, and that is Okay. The writer needs the friend who can read the shitty first draft, they need the personal conversation to vicariously utilize an experience of which they have no actual knowledge, and sometimes they need other writers to tell them they’re full of shit. And whether or not they admit it, they need their editor, the one holding the last lamp, finding not just gold but platinum and providing the stone tablet to immortalize a story—if that is the writer’s wish.

But if the editor or the teacher holds the lamp, the writers are the lamplighters. They must cultivate their own illumination and feed their consciousness of themselves to become an awareness of others. We’re all on a sinking ship, and the writers are singing (while lighting lamps, maybe), telling the truth about what we are if not what we see, buoying the readers with an exactness of words to a place of clarity, even if it is painful, even if it is joyful.

^[1] This imagery courtesy of Lamott, but because the prompt involved “distilling the essence” of a book, direct quoting was discouraged (these are, as far as I remember, the only direct lifts from the book, along with “that is Okay”). Also, I did have a Prufrock’s-crab-scuttling state of existence as a child, similar to what Lamott describes of herself. (And maybe I’m a li’l bit like that still.)

^[2] Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1994.

Story Excerpt: The Lost Panther, Chapter Two, Part One

I was poking through some old stuff while I started working on an outline for a new story, and I decided I didn’t hate the next bit of this as much as I thought. If you’ve enjoyed Chapter One, Parts One and Two, hopefully you will find this part just as appealing.

The Lost Panther Excerpt

Chapter Two, Part One

When she opened her eyes, she felt the same as she always did.

“I’m not impressed.”

Divanilan all but rolled his eyes.

“It might take an hour or more to take effect. But since you have accepted my proposal, you will need to sign a contract.”

“Contract?” Alek sat up. “Contract? A contract stipulating what, exactly?”

“I know you can read, Alexiana. The short version is that, as a Willwisher’s apprentice, certain activities are required of you and certain ones are also forbidden until your apprenticeship is up and you move to the next level.”

“Won’t I be a Willwisher?”

“Not necessarily. I hadn’t realized that most of you Madrigals didn’t know this, but many of your attendants—those who are not Willwishers—are former apprentices. They made it to the next level, to journeyman, but did not continue forward by choice or by failure to test well. This means they have the knowledge—most of it, anyway—but are forbidden to use it. They attend to Willwishers as well, being as they know what is required for our duties.”

“Fine. So what are Willwishing apprentices forbidden from doing? And what are we required to do?” She lifted an eyebrow at Divanilan.

Her life was a padded box of have-tos and can’t-dos. Would anything Divanilan offered her be worth it if she was just trading one routine for another? Being a Madrigal had not struck her as being a prisoner, insofar as she could organize her thoughts and try to assess her life outside of the hallucinations her own mind afflicted her with despite the exceedingly dull and regular routine of her day-to-day experiences. But while being an apprentice might be different in theory, it might also be just as pointless if it was only another walled path. Did she even want to be a Willwisher? She had always been alone, but not lonely. No one had cared for her particularly since she had shown up, memoryless and smiling, on the doorstep of the orphanage at age twelve. She had not needed anyone’s care, because her mind took care of her: even as her hallucinations grew stronger over her teenage years—up until she was committed as a Madrigal at fifteen—they were always for her, and not anyone else. She did not have multiple personalities like some of the others, but she often thought that her mind was her best friend, always looking out for her in ways that no one else could even begin to understand.

Why would she even try Divanilan’s treatment? The sticky sweetness of it clogged her throat and had made it hard to swallow. Was she so afraid of descending into the lifestyle of a Falsetto? Water. She needed water.

Something white and fluffy flickered on Divanilan’s desk for the briefest of moments. A rabbit? The rabbit? It did not coalesce, and she saw it was just a piece of paper.

Horseback Riding Is Better Than Therapy, or Why Hobbies Are Important

Backstory

Not unlike many female children, I was once obsessed with horses. I’d go so far as to credit my horse obsession with getting me into fantasy, because after devouring serials like Pony Pals and Thoroughbred, the other books I saw with horses on the cover were fantasy novels. (Hello, Tamora Pierce and Mercedes Lackey and Robert Jordan.)

I also had the luck to grow up in a rural area of Reno, Nevada. My mom’s house had the property for a horse, but no horse, and at least half of the houses on our street—our entire neighborhood—had horses or the dilapidated-barn remains marking them as former horse properties. I had friends who lived just about a mile away, and we were all pretty horse-obsessed. I don’t remember who got a horse first, but I don’t think it was me because my envy pushed me to compensate in other ways.

Summer may have had a horse before I did; I sincerely don’t remember. But I made her join my Pony Pals club, so joke’s on her. Also, she’s living and teaching in China for a year and writes an interesting blog about it.

What’s a horse-obsessed eight-year-old to do? Clearly, badger the shit out of her parents until they get her a pony. My first was named Comanche, a fuzzy, arthritic, gentle, and impossibly patient gelding. The first time I walked him on a halter, I tripped on a rock and fell directly into his path. He paused, unconcerned, and gave me a bemused nudge. The first time I rode him—saddle-less and with a makeshift halter-and-rope bridle—my dad backed him into a bramble pile to show me the importance of keeping my seat and wits about me while a-horseback. (Spoiler: I slid off the ass-end of my pony, who stopped immediately and started mowing the grass.)