Accepting Editorial Suggestions as a Path to Success
Writer reflects on experience working with editors
Welcome to our weekly column offering perspectives on lit mag publishing, with contributions from readers, writers and editors around the world.
Not long ago, a poet who participated in my writing workshops asked for my advice about responding to editorial suggestions. A literary journal had accepted her first poem to be published in a biannual issue, but she questioned whether the editor understood the intention behind some of her craft decisions. Was there room for dialogue, including disagreement? Or did they expect her to defer to their expertise?
I had no easy answer. In this case, the copyediting was minor, although comma placement and spacing between lines can make all the difference in a poem. Since the editor did offer the option of accepting/rejecting or commenting on each recommendation, I encouraged her to consult with them and prepare to defend her reasoning if she decided to hold firm.
It can be hard to place one’s trust in an editor. We may toil at a piece for weeks, even years, only for someone to slash and burn our words away. However, if you want your work to appear in an esteemed journal or simply one you admire, then it’s probably in your favor to graciously receive any guidance. Staying open to editorial feedback might even increase your odds at acceptance. I speak from personal experience.
Several years ago I submitted an essay to a Northern California Writers Contest at Under the Gum Tree, a literary arts magazine publishing creative nonfiction and visual art. It was declined a couple of months later with an encouraging note:
“While your piece was not selected as a finalist for the contest, there are many things we liked about it, and we hope you will allow us to consider it further for a future issue.”
I immediately replied with enthusiasm. “The Nature of Beginnings” had already been turned down by Sequestrum (“not quite right for our current needs”). I knew from a decade of collecting rejection slips, as well as some coveted successes, to seize the moment. I suggested that the essay—about embarking on a solo road trip of seven months around North America—might be a good fit for the magazine’s Those Who Wander section.
“I’m happy to consider suggestions and to make any necessary revisions,” I added. I acknowledged that the length, which adhered to contest guidelines, went a bit over word count for the column. It was accepted two days later for an upcoming issue.
Robin Martin, the managing editor at the time, cut nearly 300 words to better fit the department. “I believe the piece is stronger for it,” she noted, asking for a quick turnaround since they were on deadline.
I might have debated the merits of those now-orphaned paragraphs. But she was right. Her edits did, in fact, tighten the essay. Plus, I didn’t have to painstakingly word-smith and restructure it on my own, for which I was grateful. Had I remained stubbornly wedded to those particular words, I might have passed up the opportunity for publication.
If you want your work to appear in an esteemed journal or simply one you admire, then it’s probably in your favor to graciously receive any guidance.
I’ve heard writers express resentment toward editors as gatekeepers, but most of us can benefit from their eyes on our work. Whether or not to accept each suggestion will depend on how much you share their aesthetic, which each writer should consider before submitting to a specific lit mag. Another aspect that can influence one’s decision is how many rejections the piece has already garnered.
A few years before, I’d had a similar experience that set a template for staying open. “Wildish Woman: A Portrait” was a work of narrative nonfiction about a genderqueer wildlife biologist who transitions between natural and human-made environments each field season in Alaska. The piece made its rounds to roughly 20 literary journals, only to collect the requisite rejections. Among 13 no-thank-you’s I received in one year (including from Cutbank, The Fourth River, Crazyhorse, Bellingham Review, Crab Orchard Review, Carve, Ploughshares, Proximity, Missouri Review, and Vela Magazine), three journals came close(r).
First, the essay was selected as one of 82 semi-finalists among 277 VanderMey Nonfiction Prize entries by Ruminate Magazine.
Next, River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative “considered it deeply,” although it didn’t make the cut. A co-editor suggested the piece was missing the kind of focus and intensity they were looking for. Still, he added: “You have the chops to get there.”
Then, So To Speak Journal said they were “really impressed” with my work, which made it through to one of the last rounds. “Your essay sparked a lot of conversation and had strong advocates.” Ultimately, it was declined.
Each response was a morale-boost that helped me to maintain my stamina. Yet I was at a loss. Whatever focus it needed, I didn’t know how to fix it. Should I persist with submissions, revise it again, or give up?
Fortunately, Dini Karasik, then-publisher of Origins Journal (now defunct), came to the rescue, responding with a contingent acceptance. They’d love to publish the essay in an upcoming issue on the theme of Borders—if I could address concerns about the limited third-person point of view:
“We really like this piece but we are struggling a bit with the narrative voice… It’s unconventional to have the narrator describe scenes for which she wasn't present.”
When I workshopped a draft in my MFA program, my classmates had discussed my lack of “narrative presence” on the page, but refrained from offering prescriptive advice. Now I had something specific and straightforward to amend it—for example, a few sentences stating upfront that I imagined some of the scenes or pieced them together from multiple conversations. What had been a blindspot when left to my own devices now seemed obvious. So back to the keyboard I went. Voila!
No doubt, navigating lit mag terrain is tough. Multiple rejections taught me that acceptance is subjective and to keep my hat in the ring. Remember that a “sorry, not for us” isn’t necessarily an end, but it can be a sign that something requires reworking. Surely there are sloppy editors (I've had reportage reworded in ways that weren't my voice or, worse, edits that weren’t fact-checked), but if you're fortunate enough to work with a skilled one it may change a no—or an almost—to a yes.
Ultimately, it's your work at stake. Whether you accept an editor’s suggestions or not, you want to be proud of the finished piece.
Let us first say that there are good editors and not so good ones. How will you know? Experience. Writing and submitting a lot, no matter how much you are published, is a kind of school. Working with good editors, bad ones, and indifferent ones is also a school. Recently a story I wrote in Spanish was accepted for publication (next month, I think) by an editor whose writing I deeply admire. So I know her choices are good. She wanted to kill about eight words in the last sentence (the last sentence!) of the story. I felt pain at first. Then I allowed "butwhatif" to enter me. Then I said, you're right about these four words, but these other four? They have to stay and here's why. She said yes. My belief in those four words had been instinct before. Her challenge pushed me to defend them intellectually and that was useful for me, for her, and for the story. In this way, the best editors are collaborators who care about the piece itself, who work with you in a granular way, who are patient, and who are not suggesting changes just to suit their own thematic or word count needs.
I've been working with dozens of newspaper, magazine, anthology, and book editors for years and my work has always been improved if the suggestions rang a bell for me, so to speak. If I felt intrigued or even excited, and started making notes or even rewriting that same day I received the feedback, I knew the editor was on to something. Writers can always keep growing and learning--if they want to. And being edited so well for so long by so many people has made me a better editor myself, both when I taught creative writing at MSU and when I launched my own editing/coaching website writewithoutborders.com.