I recently received an acceptance (from a magazine I won't name) after having my story short-listed for awhile. The acceptance said that they would be sending along some notes on the manuscript for me to go over before publication.
When the story arrived with their notes, I felt like I was given a failing grade in junior high. All of these notes, redactions, reasons why things didn't work. I don't mind saying that the first thing that kicked in for me was the writer's ego. Frankly, I wanted to just flat out say no. Maybe it has just been a long time since my college workshop days, a long time since I've had peers workshop my stuff at all. Maybe it is because so many literary magazine/site editors these days are simply "yes or no" folks and I very rarely am asked for revisions. Whatever the reason, I am positive that much of the blame rests on me. But my first reaction was more towards the flight end of the fight vs... internal debate.
And then I sat down, printed out both versions (yeah, I still prefer paper to screen if I want to actually think about what I'm reading...) and read them together. And you know what? The editor was right. What they proposed made the piece a lot leaner and meaner. There were less needless tangents, less extraneous words. The story got to the point and stuck there. It was much stronger for their "interference." The editor was absolutely right.
What I'm unsure of still, however... While the piece is stronger, I do feel in a way that my "voice" or style was edited out of it to a point. I know that this has been discussed at length by people so much more well-spoken than I, but it's definitely something playing on my mind. Are we (the collective we, though I suppose I am particularly referring here to the Western We of the literary community) editing the writer out of the work? I don't suppose I'm one to talk since I regularly go on tirades against strangely-denoted dialogue in fiction, but I wonder how much of their individual style most writers are willing to let go of in a particular piece in order to see to it that it actually ends up in a form that might be read.
(I will say as an aside that I did suggest a couple of changes that I felt reintroduced some elements of the style I had in the story initially and the editor was happy to work with me. This is definitely not a tirade against this particular editor at all - I am quite happy to have worked with them and wish that I had this sort of dialogue with more editors, honestly.)
At any rate, it's a question that is keeping me occupied lately. I would love to hear thoughts in the comments section if anyone feels the spirit move them.
In other publishing news, I received my contributor's copy of Firewords Quarterly today and it is an absolutely beautiful little perfect bound volume. I definitely recommend checking them out at firewords.co.uk and incidentally, the editor suggested a change to the poem that appeared in this issue that absolutely worked and made it stronger - and made it even more authentically match up to what I would consider as my "voice." So there you go, I suppose.
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