by Ira Nayman

Early in my short-story writing career, I received a delightful email from an anthology editor who had accepted one of my works. “The hard part is over,” she wrote. “Your story has been accepted. Compared to this, editing will be easy.”

What did this editor mean? If a magazine gets 200 submissions per issue and can only accept 10 stories (to make the math easy), they are very likely to receive more than enough stories that are structurally sound, allowing them to accept only stories that do not require basic story or character reworking. Creating a story that will beat 1-in-20 odds of acceptance takes a lot of work; compared to that, rewriting as part of the editorial process is easy.

Years later, having worked as an editor, it occurred to me that the email contained a certain… defensiveness. I now find it easy to believe that, having dealt with writers who fought every editorial decision, the editor was trying to preempt protracted battles over relatively minor details.

The Writer’s Perspective

Many writers resist the editorial process for a variety of reasons. It takes a lot of time, thought and, ultimately, work to craft effective prose fiction; it can be galling to allow a stranger to come along and tell you that it has to be changed. In addition, it can be hard to accept that what you have put so much of yourself into is not perfect exactly as you wrote it. These issues can be overcome with experience. All you need is one great editor to help you see the flaws in a story and guide you through the process of correcting them to see the value in the process.

I suspect that part of the reason many writers resist the input of editors is because they find rewriting a chore. However, as Ernest Hemingway said, “The only kind of writing is rewriting.” When I come to rewrite, I usually approach it as another opportunity to exercise my creativity, to have fun with the process, and surprise myself with solutions to creative problems. In this way, I don’t get verklempt at the prospect of rewriting.

Many writers feel/fear that their relationship with editors has to be adversarial. It cannot be stressed enough that the editor is not your enemy. Quite the opposite. Editors and writers want the same thing: to publish the best version of a story as they can, albeit for slightly different reasons. The author wants to maintain their reputation, while the editor wants to maintain the reputation of the publication in which the story appears. If you ever have the misfortune to have a story published in a magazine or anthology that is not edited, the deficiencies you will subsequently find in it will be a lesson on why you really need an editor.

The Editor’s Contribution

Generally, editors will ask for two types of changes: those based on style or facts, and those based on creative interpretation. Most publications have an in-house style that they expect all stories to conform to (for instance, I think italics are overused in modern publishing, so the style of my publications is to give italics a break and use bold type for emphasis; be forewarned that I am also on a one-person crusade to bring back the interrobang). These are not debatable questions, so there is no point arguing with an editor about them.

In a similar vein, there is no point arguing if an editor suggests a writer change a factual error. For science fiction, for example, it’s important to get your science right. For all genres, dates of important historical events, the names of real people, actual geography (unless you have a reason for not using the actual facts), an editor is absolutely right to suggest that you do. No matter how obscure the fact, there will always be a reader who knows it and is taken out of the story if a writer gets it wrong.

Changes based on creative interpretation are more complicated. They may be something as simple as word choice: Does one word better convey the author’s intended meaning than another? Clarity is an important consideration: Does a sentence or paragraph convey the information it needs to in a way that will be clear to most readers? Issues of clarity may involve apparent continuity problems (if an object that is introduced as blue is referred to as red later in the story), including characters acting in ways that contradict what has already been established about them. Another issue may involve the order of scenes: Would a scene late in the story have more impact if it appeared earlier in the story?

This sort of editorial input is vital to creating the world of the story in the mind of the reader; it is often the most hotly contested by writers.

Working Together

My practice as an editor is to couch interpretive input as either a suggestion (“You might want to try…”) or a question (“This is unclear. Might it be better as…?”). If the writer makes a reasonable argument for why the change isn’t necessary, I’m usually willing to accept it (although it is also true that 90% or more of the changes I ask for are accepted by authors). I try to keep in mind that, in matters of artistic interpretation, there aren’t always clear-cut right or wrong answers. While my input makes sense to me given my understanding of how stories work, it is always possible that the writer is in a better position to judge what works for their specific story.

Until they have built the trust that comes with working together, it helps writers and editors to approach their relationship with a little humility. Authors need to respect the experience and knowledge the editor has; editors need to respect the fact that the inspiration and drive to write the story makes the author its de facto expert. This kind of mutual respect is the basis of successful creative relationships.

Ira Nayman writes humorous speculative fiction. He is the author of eight published novels and thirty-five published short stories. He was the editor of Amazing Stories magazine for three years. The Dance, his first anthology as editor, was published in 2024.