How to Make the Editor Your Friend, Special Edition: Hold the Phone September 25, 2008
Posted by creativeliberty in Uncategorized.Tags: editing, freelance tips, magazine editing, magazine writing, nonfiction writing, writer-editor relationship, writing, writing etiquette
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Photo courtesy SXC.
The issue that forms the theme of this post wasn’t part of the planned “How to make the editor your friend” series, but it’s come up so frequently lately in my “real” life that I feel it’s important to explain a particular point of etiquette to freelance writers.
In the magazine world, if you’re thinking about using the phone to contact an editor you don’t know to introduce yourself, don’t. As rude as it sounds, don’t call us, we’ll call you.
It’s nothing personal, and editors really, really aren’t on perpetual coffee break. But the typical editor spends a lot of his/her day being a project manager: chasing down articles being edited or being laid out for the magazine, making sure a story has passed through the fact-check process with flying colors, conferring with designers about appropriate photos or accurate captions, leading meetings planning an issue three months out, etc. Another big chunk of editor time gets taken up with actual, honest-to-God editing: reading rough drafts, sending back suggestions, doing line edits and cleaning up sentence-level issues, and of course finally doing copy editing of a finalized manuscript. It is hard sometimes to find the time to field a call from someone who doesn’t have a specific agenda with regards to an article idea or who is waiting for the editor to “find something” for them to do.
Still, editors need writers like they need air to breathe, food to eat and water to stay hydrated. But we like to meet our needs for a pool of qualified freelancers on our terms. Think of it this way—if you were in the middle of a big project, and I kept calling you every other day to let you know that I thought you should write for my publication (without offering you an assignment), wouldn’t you start to get annoyed?
Here’s my advice to the freelancers who call me: send me your resume and some clips via e-mail. Better yet, if you have a portfolio site, send me the hyperlink. I am very impressed by a well-designed site, in large part because it answers all my questions in one place—qualifications (via a resume), clips (via URLs or PDF downloads), specialties (communicated via your selection and arrangement of clips or by a well-written summary of your writing experiences) and recommendations (via testimonials from editors).
If you don’t have the site, your resume and clips tell me a lot. And if you supply me with the contact information of an editor who has enjoyed working with you, I can quickly vet your ability to meet deadlines, adhere to word counts, work on revisions, etc.
Once a writer has worked for me, the phone etiquette changes substantially. I usually still prefer e-mail story pitches, but I don’t mind chatting with my writers by phone when they are on assignment. At that point, communication is collegial and not persuasive “messaging.”
Common sense and empathy go a long, long way to promote happy writer-editor relationships. Put yourself in my shoes and ask yourself if you’d like to receive an unsolicited, unfocused call asking for work from someone you don’t know. If not, don’t make it.
Related Links:
How to Successfully Query an Editor: An Editor’s View
Sample Query Letters That Worked: Real Queries That Landed Magazine Assignments
The art of feedback June 29, 2008
Posted by creativeliberty in Uncategorized.Tags: editing, editor, feedback on writing, joni b. cole, magazine editing, magazine writing, story coaching, toxic feedback book, writer, writer-editor communication, writing
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I found a great book a few months back that addresses the ever-touchy subject of how to provide (and take) writing-related feedback. “Toxic Feedback” by Joni B. Cole is a great overview to the topic, and Joni’s quirky sense of humor softens the sharpest edge of her tales of feedback gone wrong.
One of the most important things to remember about feedback, she says, is
“You are the boss of your own story. Not the other writers in your critique group. Not the famous author whose workshop you were lucky enough to get into at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. Not even your mother-in-law, who comes into your house while you are at work and vacuums the mattresses because someone has to protect her grandchildren from dust mites. When it comes to applying feedback, you–and only you–are the one who gets to determine what stays and what goes in your story. And that is a good thing.”
I like that she covers feedback about a wide variety of writing, from fiction and memoir to academic writing and creative non-fiction. She doesn’t presume the reader is coming from a writer’s workshop environment, or seeking feedback from his or her spouse, or waiting for a response from her agent, etc.
I often have to come at feedback from the other side of the table—as an editor, I give out far more feedback than I receive these days. And while I do believe the writer is the boss of the story, in magazine writing it’s a little more complicated than that.
For one thing, at my publication (which is an institutional magazine), I do most of the assigning and accept fewer over-the-transom or queried submissions than might be typical of other magazines. So writers start out adapting to my vision for the story, or (hopefully) collaborating with me in developing it as we go along.
I try to communicate with writers all through the research and writing process; a few have taken this as evidence that I don’t trust them to bring home the story, but most understand what I’m doing—preventing unnecessary surprise by soliciting information from them about how the story development process is going.
When the first draft comes in, I put on the macro-lenses of my editing glasses. I try to focus my feedback on the big “keystones” of the piece—angle and structure. If those are right, line editing may be able to fix a lot of the other issues with the piece. If not, and there are holes in the research that I can’t fill, I know I’ll need another draft from them.
I’ve taken to providing writers a “story edit memo” for articles needing a second draft from them. The memo is just a formalized way of providing feedback. I lead with stating to the writer what was the gist of the story I read (to see how it matches with the gist of the story they were assigned to provide me), and follow with what I thought the writer got RIGHT with the manuscript. Then, and only then, do I provide so-called negative or critical feedback.
It’s important for critical feedback to be specific. In my type of editing, this is enlightened self-interest if nothing else: I can’t tell the writer to “make it sparkle on your next draft” and expect him or her to understand that I wanted them to clean up the attribution of the quotes, use the active voice more and cut 200 words.
In “Toxic Feedback,” Joni spends several chapters looking at how to respond to toxic feedback (which she defines as “commentary that undermined [a writer’s] confidence and their writing”), including a great one recounting how several writers channeled the feelings stirred up by blistering or broadly dismissive critiques of their work to become better at their craft. I hope that I never make my writers feel blistered, but in my case, I don’t entrust a writer with lots of specific critical feedback unless I think they can take it to heart.
In other words, don’t always assume that a lot of critical feedback on a piece means your work is no good. It may be you got a lot of constructive advice because your work is so good it would be a shame not to refine it and make it the best it can be.
