Writers Tricks of the Trade Volume 6, Issue 5 | Page 20

What Being an Editor Taught Me
JOHN BRANTINGHAM
I have been a writer for as long as I can remember, but I became one of two
fiction editors of The Chiron Review, a literary journal, about ten years ago.
The Chiron Review is on hiatus now, perhaps permanently, and that’s not
necessarily a bad thing. These kinds of magazines come and go because maintaining
the focused energy necessary to keep them running is difficult. New energy is
needed. New vision, too.
JOHN BRANTINGHAM, AUTHOR,
POET, PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH

And that’s the first thing being a fiction editor for a magazine taught me about
the business of writing. I always had passion for writing, but until I edited, I didn’t
know how much passion editors have for their job as well.
At the center of that passion is the sincere desire to create something
worthwhile and fulfilling. No one is going to volunteer that much time to make
absolutely no profit for anything but love. What they want, what I wanted, was to
create something great for the readers and the writers. I was a writer first after all,
and I saw the whole endeavor from the writer’s point of view. I wanted to help
them all. I wanted to work with them.
Before I was an editor, I found the writer-editor relationship intimidating. I’m
not sure why. But I soon saw what the real relationship was. That was why for the
first couple of years I edited, I wrote a personal note to anyone who submitted a
story to me.
I tried to encourage and explain. Most of what I read was good but misplaced. A
magazine is an artistic expression of its own. The art of it is the juxtaposition of
certain kinds of stories. That doesn’t mean just collecting a large group of good
stories, but stories that fit the mission of the magazine.
Given that, rejection isn’t such a painful thing. It’s not a rejection of the writer
or even his or her work, just an acknowledgement that the story doesn’t fit into the
mission of the magazine.
I wrote longer notes to people whose work I liked very much but needed a little
tweaking to fit into my vision of the magazine. One story I remember in particular I
asked a revision for. The writer wrote back and said he’d make the changes. Two
months later, he sent the same story back without changes but pretending that he
had. I asked him to make the changes again, and he agreed and then sent the same
story again still with no changes. We went through this dance a couple more times
until I asked him to stop sending it.
I think he thought that I wasn’t going to remember his story. He was wrong. I
loved his work. The first time it was submitted, I read it several times. It’s been six
or seven years now, and I can still remember the fine points of the characters and
plot. I think he viewed me as a kind of enemy or hurdle rather than someone who
was trying to help him.

SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2016

PAGE 12

WRITERS’ TRICKS OF THE TRADE