Too Many Darlings
When my editor sent me back revisions for my novel earlier this year, I did something that would have horrified me when I started writing professionally.
I highlighted the entire Word document — all 300 or so pages — went to the “review” menu at the top, and hit “accept all.”
Done.
I read through it afterward, of course. And I fought for one or two passages I wanted to keep as-is. But I had never surrendered so completely to an editor’s vision, and it was a minor breakthrough. Why shouldn’t I trust someone else more than me to decide how something reads? I’m me — and I’ve already read it too many times.
Fresh eyes are almost always right.
The version of my book that my editor crafted was sharper, funnier, and more tightly plotted. She’s fantastic at what she does, of course, but there’s also a baseline level of improvement that stems from the process itself. Anyone would be better than no editor at all. At this point, I’d rather have a stranger in a coffee shop polish something I wrote than publish it directly, like I’m doing now on ye olde Substack dot com.
“Kill your darlings,” the saying goes, and for good reason. Maybe some of your darlings are really great, but if you’ve done your job right, you should still have most of them left even after an editor murders a bunch of them. The give-and-take of sacrificing some of your favorite sentences to preserve others is — I have come to believe — an inherently productive exchange, not just for the quality of your writing, but for your ability to communicate and collaborate with fellow creators.
It took me a while to get to this place, I’ll admit. Longer than it should have. I’ve always appreciated good editing, but when I first started out eight years ago, I placed more weight on individual pieces because, frankly, I didn’t know how much longer I could make money doing this. Operating from that place of scarcity, I wanted each project to match my initial vision for it.
What if this was the only book I got to write? was my logic. Well, then, it should be exactly how I want it!
Me, me, me.
There’s just one slight problem with that attitude: Readers don’t really care about you getting your ego exercise. They just care whether the book is good or not. And it’s your editor’s job to make a good book even better.
I can only ruefully smile at the fact that my evolving relationship to editing seems to have taken place as more people than ever publish straight to readers, sometimes by choice, but more often due to a digital writing economy in which full-time positions have grown scarce and editors are juggling enormous Rolodexes of freelancers, rarely devoting the level of attention that can help a writer grow. I’ve been blessed with great editors in the last year or so — Mason Bryan at Crosscut and Eliza Smith at LitHub, especially — but they stand out precisely because they care so much about each piece they publish.
And I think maybe that’s why I’m struggling a bit with updating this newsletter regularly, as much as I enjoy sending out the occasional odd thought. Ever since I started indiscriminately killing my darlings in 2019, it feels almost presumptuous of me to send words straight to you without having someone else look at them first.
If you maintain a newsletter and you’ve grappled with this question, let me know if you’ve got any advice to offer. Do you have someone else read before you publish? Or do I just have to slay my own darlings?