The Editor

“What the fuck is this?”

“Seriously. What. The. Actual. Fuck. Is. This?”

“Comma splice there.”

“That doesn’t even remotely resemble a proper sentence.”

“Another comma splice.”

”Correct, writing dessert when you meant desert does, in fact, prove you’re an imbecile. I’m glad you at least realized that without me.”

”Is your lead tall, dark, and handsome? Or is he a whiny little sycophant? I literally cannot tell if this is supposed to be one person or two. Can we get narrator voice in here?”

“Mhhhm yes, of course…can I recommend writing him like Patrick Dempsey? Best of all the above and would look great when Amazon buys this for a billion dollars.”

“Gods thank you…at least half of us here have sense.”

“Water is the essence of wetness is better imagery than whatever this crap is.”

“Hey I liked how he explained three times how the scars on the man’s lips looked! It really drove it home for me that the man had scars on his lips and that was the end of his characterization.”

“Shut up Audience Voice. We all know you’d be pleased with a slice of deli roast beef when you ordered a medium rare New York Strip with the horseradish crust.”

“Honestly, drop this one deep in the depths of your google drive like it’s Batman, but make sure its back actually, completely breaks though. This should never see the light of day.”

“Truly impressive work here. All this time spent theorizing about how infinite monkeys with typewriters gifted infinite time would replicate the collective works of William Shakespeare, and you’ve definitively proven that one monkey throwing shit at a window is more entertaining than anything produced by you. Congrats!”

“Really? Going through it again? What is this, draft ten? What’s even the point? If you post this you’ll literally lose any small bit of credibility you had. I’d unfollow you.”

Please shut the fuck up.

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…

…

Submit.

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…

…

”Who wrote this? You? Really? Maybe we’re not half bad. I claim seventy percent of the credit.”

You know, we really must have have a chat about our partnership’s impact on my sanity.

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A/N:

Based loosely on an experience I had editing this week. I’m a firm believer that any writer has four voices fighting for supremacy at any given moment:

Writer’s voice: this is the one that cares about things like “plot” and “tone”. This is the one we want to listen to.

Audience voice: this is the one that lives off the slop. It wants, no yearns, for that set piece battle, for the two leads to have a completely out of character romp between the sheets, the bad guy to get decaptiated. You get it. This is the one we love to listen to.

Narrator voice: this is a tougher one, but this is the voice that we THINK our story has. This is the narrator. This is the one that knows exactly what our characters look and sound like when we don’t even know ourselves, our casting director if you will. This is the voice we go to for direction.

Finally, there’s the editor…fuck this (feel free to insert your pronoun here), but unfortunately he’s the one that separates out the good from the crap. For that, we thank the editor for all that they do.

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