How to Avoid Taking Edits Too Personally

Ask the Editor is a column for your questions about the editing process and editors themselves. It’s a place to bring your conundrums and dilemmas and mixed feelings, no matter how big or small. Want to be considered? Learn more and submit your question.

This month’s Ask the Editor is sponsored by 805 Writers Conference. The 805 Writers Conference delivers the information you need to succeed in publishing—all of the tools, skills, and resources—available virtually and in person—November 5 & 6. Conference sessions, specialty workshops, and a book expo featuring 50+ authors. Join us at the beach!

Question

I’ve just written my first nonfiction book, about gardening in my region. It’s a compilation of twelve years’ worth of newspaper and magazine articles and blog posts, about 45,000 words total. I’m planning to self-publish with a hybrid publisher, meaning I have to edit the manuscript, choose the fonts, choose and insert the photos in the right place, and so on. After the line edits, I have a proofreader in place, then I’ll send it off.

A retired editor friend of mine referred me to a working editor friend of hers to do the first edit, a line edit. I also asked for the editor’s thoughts about whether the title conveys what the book was about, and to see if the slant about gardening in the region was obvious. After she looked at the manuscript and did some editing on the first chapter, we agreed to work together and settled on a fee.

I didn’t realize how horrible I’d feel when the first round of edits came back. The changes in format and content, comments about structure, and questions about the content deflated me after two hours. I felt like nothing I’d done was right, that a year’s worth of work was being torn apart. In tears, I was afraid to tackle it the second day and the third.

My retired editor friend told me I was taking the edits too personally. She and I worked on a query and a book proposal of mine a couple years ago, and it took a toll on our friendship. We got through it and now we laugh, but she’s acutely aware of my response. She assured me that editors edit for the reader, not to chastise the writer. That was and still is hard for me to see.

So my question is, how can I detach from the process and thicken my skin?

—In Tears

Dear In Tears:

First things first: This sounds like a really challenging project! Combining different short bits of writing into a coherent whole is quite a puzzle in itself. Plus, it’s very likely that over twelve years, your style and approach to writing have evolved, maybe in ways that you haven’t been able to notice, because you’re so close to it. Which is just to say that as a starting point, it might be helpful to remember that this is a very complicated project you’ve undertaken.

In fact, the nature of this project reminds me in some ways of another kind of project: home organization! I wonder whether it could help to think of your book project as a closet make-over: you have collected twelve years of stuff, and let’s say you’ve spent a fair amount of time working on it on your own; you’ve emptied the closet and tossed the truly no-good stuff, removed the stuff that actually belongs in the attic, grouped similar items, and so on. You’ve put everything you want to keep back in the closet, more or less. But you know it could be better.

You want your closet to look the way a stranger’s closet looks at the end of an HGTV episode—everything just so, orderly and easy to make sense of, with clever storage solutions and labels. A place for everything and everything in its place, etc.

So you’ve called in help! You’ve hired an expert closet-organizer, who has jumped in to do her thing. She’s re-grouped some of your items, in the process discovering that you have, actually, no fewer than fourteen blue scarves, and she’s wondering whether you really meant to keep them all. Where you had sorted things into a stack of shoe boxes, she’s brought in a system of nifty containers, with a slightly better size and more regular dimensions, clean panels so you can see what’s inside, and a spot for a nice label.

And, looking at it all now, you’re feeling a little embarrassed. You didn’t realize you had so many  scarves, and ok, fine, that stack of shoe boxes was pretty wobbly and likely to fall over in the first week. You’re seeing all the things you might have done better, and the closet-organizer’s changes feel like a criticism.

But here’s the thing: the closet organizer isn’t thinking that at all. Sure, she saw problems, but she also understands that most people struggle with organizing the detritus of 21st-century life. In fact, she’s built a profession around helping them with this challenge!

The closet-organizer has two big advantages in this scenario:

First, it’s pretty easy to be objective about the contents of someone else’s closet. The closet-organizer doesn’t have a sentimental attachment to the shoes you wore to your wedding but can’t fit into now. (Do you need to keep these? she’ll ask politely. Could they be stored somewhere else, perhaps in the back corner of the closet or in the attic or maybe even not in your house at all?)

Second, the closet-organizer has organized a lot of closets, while you’ve probably mostly focused only on yours. That’s why you’re paying her! She’s learned, over time, which kind of hook holds up and which is plastic crap that will break the minute you hang anything heavier than a necklace on it. She’s learned that it’s worth it to get matching hangers, and she’s a whiz at that shirt-folding trick that lets you see everything in the drawer.

A small side note: can I promise that the heart of the closet-organizer is pure as driven snow? I cannot. It is possible, maybe even likely, that, deep down, she maintains a secret list of truly, exceptionally disastrous closets she’s encountered. (Yours probably isn’t one of them.) She might quietly be thinking, Lady, let some of the scarves go. (If she said that out loud, that’s a different story; I’m assuming your closet-organizer’s comments and notes were all polite and professional.) But you can’t really worry too much about that. And I can almost guarantee you that, ultimately, she’ll take some—maybe even a lot of—satisfaction from helping you tackle that closet. And you should, too: you’ve done a lot of work!

At the risk of stretching this metaphor too far, it’s also only fair to acknowledge that there’s another layer here, logistically: I’ve sort of assumed the kind of reality-show scenario where you left someone to organize your closet while you had a nice weekend away at the beach. But in fact, getting a manuscript back full of tracked changes is a little more grueling than that because you actually have to decide whether to approve each step: Do you need this blue scarf? How about this one? What if I move this blue scarf here, and stack this other blue scarf on top of it? Can I put the scarves in front of the wedding shoes, on the third shelf? Oh, but that doesn’t leave room for the shoes, so maybe they should move down a shelf.

And it’s true: that process can very quickly feel overwhelming. So I’m also going to suggest a little hack that might make it feel a little more like the reality-show beach-trip scenario. When I send line edits to writers, I almost always send two versions of the file. The first version has everything tracked in: formatting changes, sentence-level suggestions, queries, notes, straight apostrophes changed to “curly,” etc. It can look like a lot of changes, especially if global changes in formatting (every single apostrophe, changed!) are tracked in—sort of like getting a paper back covered in red ink. To make the second file, I save a copy of the first file and then accept all of my suggested changes in one fell swoop. I tell writers that of course they don’t need to accept all of my suggestions, but that it might be easier to start from that clean file and then go back to the other file when it seems helpful. In other words, it’s sort of like “Ta-da! Here’s what your closet would look like if I organized it, but see what works and what doesn’t work for you, and then we can go back and play around with it some more if you don’t like how parts of it look.”

Which is to say that, if you generally trust your editor—as it sounds like you do—maybe a way to approach the manuscript you got back is to take a bit of it, save a new file, hit “Accept All Changes” and see what it looks like. In the best-case scenario, you’ll be delighted by how well the manuscript reads: there’s all of your stuff, just a little more shipshape than you left it. Probably, you’ll still have a little bit of rearranging and polishing left to do. And ultimately, especially given that you’re self-publishing, you can decide to accept or reject any of the changes—keep every single scarf, if you really must. But I suspect that not having to engage with every single change might make the whole process feel a little less daunting.

Good luck!

—Hattie Fletcher

This month’s Ask the Editor is sponsored by 805 Writers Conference. The 805 Writers Conference delivers the information you need to succeed in publishing—all of the tools, skills, and resources—available virtually and in person—November 5 & 6. Conference sessions, specialty workshops, and a book expo featuring 50+ authors. Join us at the beach!

Hattie Fletcher

Hattie Fletcher is one of the co-founders of Short Reads, a free literary email featuring flash nonfiction. She is the former managing editor of Creative Nonfiction and True Story magazine.

Essays she has edited have been reprinted in The Best American Essays, The Best American Travel Writing, and The Best Women’s Travel Writing series and have been awarded the Pushcart Prize. She has also worked on books covering such topics as end-of-life care, personalized medicine, education, mental health, and parenting.