Believe me, editing is a daunting task. An editor, who doesn’t
earn some haters on daily basis, is not an editor; said YNK. But the writers
always want to be closer and nicer to the editor, so it is really difficult to
keep the writers at bay. I hope some of my past experiences with my editors
come handy now when I am wearing editor’s hat.
Even after writing a lot for magazines, I still have not
figured out what editors want. It is as mysterious as the other side of the
moon. Once I had sent this draft on some scientific invention, and as expected,
got a call within a day from the local magazine editor. He was nice and polite
for first couple of minutes, showing a lot of interest in my life, breakfast
and beer brands. But later, he took my article on his table, and started
explaining how stupid I must be to send such a bullshit to his prestigious
magazine. “Who does understand this nonsense? You have written words like
space, rocket, hydrogen and astronomy. Who do you think your readers are? Do
they need to keep Webster’s Dictionary next to your article and turn its pages
every time they find a new word like these? Dilute your gin, pour more soda and
then, offer the drink”, he was furious.
However, I learnt my first lesson: Don’t
include scientific words in your science article. “Three guys jumped out of the
bloody floating bus and screamed, ‘hey! We reached moon, man!’” would be perfectly
fine.
One fine morning, as I was getting ready for my work, got a
call from this literary magazine. It was quite a surprise since I had sent my
most creative work a few days back, and now the poetry division head himself
had taken pains to give a ring. “Hi Chakra, your poem is beautifully written.
Where was the talent hidden all these days, bud! Why were you wasting your time
and energy on writing science which hardly has any readership?”, the person on
the other end was trying to be as polite and friendly as possible with this
heartbreaking comment. After the initial foreplaying on phone, he came to the
business talk. “See, the problem is, we need to edit before publishing. That is
the policy. Be it anything, we need to do our job sincerely. So, as the
procedure, I had to edit your poem.” “What!!!” , I silently screamed on the top
of the roof! We edit poems in magazines?? “Don’t worry, dear poet. I have not
done any major alteration. Have just cut your poem short by two lines. Just two
lines. Just last two lines. That’s all. Don’t collapse!”, he was consoling my
soul. “But..but, it was a sonnet, right!”, I am not sure if I told it loud and
clear. I guess, I didn’t.
Lesson two: If you love your baby, keep her under
your blanket.
Once, I had this e-mail by editor of a monthly fiction
magazine. It is always an honor to get a letter from the editor herself. I had
a letter from her, saying she needed some alterations in my mystery story. “See
the problem is, the moment we start reading a murder mystery, we start guessing
about the murderer. And most of the times, 99% to be precise, the murderer is
one among the characters depicted within the story. So, logically, the reader
too confines his guessing to the characters that have come and gone in the
story. The real problem is, when you have only four characters in the story,
and one of them has died.. The murderer must be one among the three. Don’t you
think one can easily guess..since the sample space is so small? Keeping this
view in mind, please rework on your piece (of ???) and send again”, read the
mail. Now all I had to do is to either increase the sample space by bringing in
more people into the death ceremony or to keep the murderer completely out of
the story even if he or she is important to the plot. I fell into the trap. I
increased the number first. Brought more and more ‘specially needed’ characters
like butler, cobbler, carpenter, teacher, cook, plumber and snake charmer, so
that the story is full of characters which could possibly make it difficult for
the reader guess who the culprit was. The editor contacted me several times and
asked for more changes. So, we replaced the cook with a guard, made a gender transformation
to some, married some, made some older and some younger, and so on. Finally the
editor managed to get a publishable work out of me, and a few months later, the
story, to my relief, saw the light of print. The murderer was not the part of
story, as editor desired it to be, so, I even kept the entire murder scene off the
murder mystery to safeguard myself.
Lesson Three: Editor is your first (and
possibly the only) enemy.
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“No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.” - H.G. Wells
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“No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.” - H.G. Wells
