This Is Not the Life I Ordered - Editing with Friends

 This Is Not the Life I Ordered - Editing with Friends

As a writer, I’ve been asked to read over, rewrite, offer an opinion, and downright completely write a lot of friends’ papers, press releases, legal briefs, cover letters, and so on. And even though I can’t call myself a professional editor quite yet, I’ve had the pleasure of editing a novel for a small independent publisher (that never published the novel) and, as an advertising copywriter, edited and revised countless brochure copy written by clients who should never be allowed to write at all. And then there’s editing my own work. I know Writer me pretty well and I think I know Editor me pretty well too. All have lended great experiences to me as a writer and as an aspiring editor. Yet, some of these situations work out better than others. Generally speaking, I approach these situations differently depending on the circumstances.

Some Smart People Can’t Write

A lot of exceptionally bright people have great ideas or stories but just aren’t great at putting them into words. When my friend became the University of Michigan’s second African-American homecoming queen in the school’s history she wanted to write a pitch to black media titles like Ebony and Jet about the experience in the hopes that they would do a story on her. This was a great story and for the market she wanted it hardly seemed like a hard sell. When I took a look at what she wrote I realized that she a) didn’t really know what a pitch was, and b) didn’t really know how to tell a story. As intelligent as she is (today she is an attorney), storytelling was not her thing. And, unlike the Harvard lawyer I once dated who actually used the word "worstly" in a legal brief he thankfully had me look over before sending (!!), with my homecoming queen friend, every sentence was grammatically correct. But the story was stiff, started way too early (her earliest memory in life) and didn’t resonate with the historical magnitude that her accomplishment deserved. I helped her realize what her story was and rewrote the pitch. Sadly, the magazines didn’t think it was enough of an event to do a story on my friend (I know, right???) but she was very happy with our attempt.

Lost In Space - There’s a Universe Between the Thought and the Page

I have a friend who is a successful advertising copywriter because she is an idea-generator and conceptualist. But her actual writing is not her strongest point. We have worked together many times over the years and, even though it remains largely unspoken, she is aware of her deficits in this area and looks to me as her sort of editorial big brother. I’ve written for her many times and, when I’m asked, I go over her work and try to nudge the genius out of her that works so well spoken but doesn’t always translate on the page. She’s also my writing partner in a script we sold and I love our sort of Lennon/McCartney relationship. We chat about each scene and I hunker down and write it. When she wants to write a scene and it’s not showing what it’s saying, so to speak, I gently try to bring it out of her. 

The Poseur/User

I have a former-friend who earned an actual living as a writer but could not write her way out of a Strand bookstore canvas bag. She was one of the biggest fake-it-til-you-make-it stories I’ve ever met. She was a contributing writer for Allure, the women’s beauty magazine published by Conde Nast and edited by Linda Wells. She started an online blog. I wrote all of her press releases, most of her content, and edited almost everything she submitted to both the magazine and her blog. We took three of The New School Creative Writing professor and memoirist Susan Shapiro’s writing workshops together that the author hosts in her home (bragging point: Shapiro liked me as a critic so much she asked me to come back for two more, free of charge!) Meanwhile, I was waiting tables because no magazine would hire me. But she looked the part. Very pretty, stylish, and every bit the walk-on character in an episode of Girls or Sex and the City, she looked in her Marc Jacobs baby doll dresses, shagged hair, and oversized Gucci aviator glasses what a style writer should look like. Me, not so much, apparently. So she got jobs that I wrote for her. Finally, one day she asked me how I liked something she wrote. I finally told her, “Robin, you can’t write. I mean, you just can’t. I don’t know where to begin. You just don’t see the world in an extraordinary enough way.” That sounds rough, but she knew it was true. It wasn’t long after she started asking me for too much help without enough (or any, often) compensation before I finally filed her under “Ex-Friend.”

Role Play

My screenwriting partner has another business and the website is constantly updated. This usually involves calling me. I know her company and her mind very well and what she’ll like and not like so writing together is like performing a duet. It’s even more collaborative than when we are working on the script because on the website I literally write while she talks. And then we review and revise it together.

Me, Myself, and I

Editing my own work is a little like role-play: I have to pretend I didn’t write the piece and be as objective as possible when reviewing my own work. It can be a little meta, which is why I like to put some space between the drafting and revision stages, or I risk not noticing things because I’m still being Writer me and Editor me isn’t ready yet. Of course, one can only edit oneself so much. I find it hard to cut things. I skew toward long sentences and that’s usually the first thing I try to reign in. And, as a MS in Publishing candidate, the more I learn about the intricacies of grammar the more I wince at some of the things I’ve written in the past that could have been a little tighter in that department. But overall, I find editing my work the most satisfying part of the writing process. You have a body of work you created and now you’re perfecting it. It’s a nice feeling.