I make my living these days from editing, critiques, and publishing consultations, having segued recently from nearly ten years of publishing my own books. I’ve been editing from the beginning of my alleged career, when double duty as a typesetter and reporter at a weekly newspaper necessitated learning the skills of copy-editing and copy-amputating along with the craft of writing. Since then I have critiqued hundreds of manuscripts and edited many books bound for publication, along with co-writing, ghostwriting, and working with editors on my own books. I’ve helped prepare books for a well-known New York literary agency, as well as a number of major publishing houses, including Viking, Doubleday, Crown, JP Tarcher, and John Wiley & Sons.

Thus I’ve had considerable experience dealing with the tempestuous egos of writers who are determined to defend their awkward sentence constructions, florid overwriting, and clichéd expressions almost to the death. When I am edited by someone else, I will likewise defend my own stylistic weaknesses nigh unto the bitter end. Whether I am dealing with my own protests or those of my clients, I still marvel over the remarkably thin and transparent skins of all writers. Why, I’ve often wondered, are we so goddamn sensitive?

The cynic may answer that all of us ink-stained wretches (including the hip, contemporary species of digital wretches) are just that: hopelessly neurotic folk trying to sort out their hapless, unworkable lives through endless writin’ and ruminatin’, and coming up with so little that’s truly defensible that the mere writing becomes more dear to them than life itself. My own take is more charitable: I believe that most writing done for creative purposes is truly soul work, the attempt to render in visible words the invisible essence of our root consciousness.

Because all but the most formulaic or technical writing has a deep and mysterious source, we tend to equate whatever we put down on paper or the screen with our very soul. So when some smart-ass editor comes along and suggests that what we have written isn’t very easy to read, or doesn’t make sense, or is just plain stupid, we naturally take offense. The deepest, truest, purest part of ourselves has just been attacked for no good reason, and we owe it to God and Cosmos to take up arms against the infidels.

What I often have to remind myself — and gently suggest in various artful ways to my editing clients — is that while our writing may indeed be inspired by the deepest and truest parts of ourselves, those parts don’t get put down on paper in their pure form. The mystical, creative oomph we feel in the gut has to rise up through countless layers of thinking, feeling, word-associating, conscious and unconscious censorship, and sheer egotism before it can find expression in words. Not surprisingly, this baroquely complex translation process can too easily result in a hideous disguise of the original soulful impulse....

 

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Copyright 2006 by D. Patrick Miller. All rights reserved.
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