WEALTH OF IDEAS

The longer I work with writers, the more I am beginning to understand the relationship between a writer an editor--the clearer I understand my role as both a writer and an editor, two often conflicting roles, yet this is the kind of conflict every writer should experience. Let me attempt to explain. As an editor, I am not trying to destroy your story. Why would I? I do this out of a love for stories: I want to witness the birth of many masterpieces. But I am guided by the empathy for fellow writers' efforts, which then guide me not to simply flatter you, but to make sure your story comes to life. The story, whether we know it yet or not, is why we are here. The time we--writer and editor--must spend on the story may seem wasted, especially when we create chunks of text, only to destroy them in another editing cycle; the time we spend is an investment, to build something about which we will be confident and happy thirty years from now. I see the story not for what it is today, but f...

I have been reading Flannery O'Connor's short stories since March. Reading them slowly, because she wrote them slowly, over a long stretch of time, sometimes on publisher deadlines which she didn't meet; she was always hesitant to let go of her work. For those not familiar with O'Connor, she was a shy Georgia woman who brought her Southern drawl to graduate school at the University of Iowa in the 1940s. Her MFA teachers and peers thought little of her, but when she read her first story in a workshop, it is said that she mesmerized her listeners, and as everyone would shortly discover, she had already published her first story "The Geranium". Flannery O'Connor believed in re-writing and did not allow a story to satisfy her easily. Then those characters of hers, Hazel, Enoch and others, kept coming back in different stories. The early stories were so connected that she later turned them into the novel Wise Blood. Her stories were re-written and transfigure...