Link to Merrill Joan Gerber's "Why I Must Give Up Writing" (republished by therumpus.net)

My thoughts upon reading: Editors are idiots.

Full disclosure: I often work as an editor (and am doing so now).

More thoughts: (1) Damon Knight once told me, "Publishers are giant toads. Editors are wonderful people, but they work for giant toads." I'm sure he also wrote this somewhere, but he said it directly to me and I wrote it down. (2) In fact the whole game has changed, and pain such as MJG's is no longer necessary, because she could have started her own publishing company and become her own (extremely impoverished) toad, but how to realize the benefits of freedom?

More of my own editor-thoughts: Editors can really help people. What I try to do is first let the text tell me what IT wants to be, and then help it become that. This may involve a certain kind of therapy with the author. But together we listen to the text and do what it wants. While editing I don't think intensely about the sales aspect, but I do think intensely about the readers. And texts crave readers so it has been my experience that when we really let the text do what it wants, people who read it subsequently want to print out (or tear apart) the pages and roll in them and rub them all over their bodies. (Or the cultural equivalent thereof.)

Because it's not my main job, I only take on projects where I think I can deliver this sort of result, and where I think I am a good editor for the work. As with therapy, editing is most effective when the editor has makes an emotional connection with the work and has a vision of it being better.

Many of the full-time editors I have met are dedicated, impoverished, and exhausted. The two that I've known who seem (or seemed, at the time that I knew them) to relish what they do the most are the Nielsen Haydens. (No hyphen. When they married they both took both names.) That is not to say Patrick is incapable of torture: one year at Viable Paradise he had the galleys of a new Patrick O'Brien novel upstairs and (a) told us but (b) wouldn't let us see. He could just not have told us. Theresa is sometimes sleepy but that's because she has narcolepsy (and the medications that help are badly regulated) but aside from that they are both playful and energetic.

The gatekeeping and selection functions of editing are totally different from what I usually do for clients. However, I have recently done some selection of my own by updating my blog subtitled, "Let's play follow the reader." There may be too much detail (and meta) for anyone but me, but if you are interested in games, poetry, collaboration or innovation you might enjoy the list on the right. I will now cross-post two recent postings that I found during this update, which very much concern the theme Gerber raised so long ago:

Justine Larbalestier's posting on RSI and so much more, "Farewell For Now"

Bassey Ikpi's re-posting of "One Good Reason To Stay (A Poem for Phyllis Hyman)"

Stop, or continue? Go, or stay? Each of us will have a slightly different answer.