What Does an Editor Do, Really?
Sometimes getting better is a matter of working with the right constraints.
When I was an editor at Snopes, a popular mythbusting site, I worked with a writer who focused on misleading photos. He was a great researcher and a fast writer who could easily grind out the required three stories a day. But in every piece he wrote, he used the same transition sentence: “Although [something about the claim], [something else about the claim].”
Although this photograph looks real, frogs don’t really grow this big. Although many people were fooled, this photograph is fake. After we’d been working together for a while, I pointed out the sentence structure and asked him to stop using it for a month. He agreed, with good humor, and kept writing. A few weeks later, another editor sent me a lede he’d written. It was sharp, funny. His next few articles were fresh and original too. When he couldn’t write on automatic mode anymore, he started to play. We were thrilled. And so, we started handing him more and more complex topics to write about.
Later, he confessed to me that when he was writing his fast, pre-structured pieces, he really wasn’t enjoying his work. When he stopped doing that, he started delighting himself, and therefore delighting his audience.
We need structure to rein in our wildest flights of fancy and runaway trains of thought. A good structure is like rules for a game. We can zigzag within the rule structure and avoid running off the field. But when the structure becomes limiting, we have to break our patterns. That’s why I switched from poetry to journalism in the mid-2010s. I could write a “Megan Alpert” poem in my sleep, but I had no idea how to produce a nonfiction article. That was both exciting and terrifying. At first, I favored long articles because it gave me lots of room to zigzag, give context, and qualify my arguments. But when I was writing for Foreign Policy, I was expected to produce short daily blog posts on breaking international news, adding time and word constraints I had never had to deal with before. It was extremely uncomfortable. Yet, there was often pure joy in finding a fresh or nuanced way to spin things in just a few sentences. Some headlines I never would have written if not for that job:
“Pro-Putin Biker Gang Still Can’t Get Into Poland”
“Vagina Kayak not Obscene, But Digital Scan of a Vulva Is, Japanese Court Finds.”
“Australia to Aid Group: Sorry-Not-Sorry For Blaming You For Dead Refugees”
I got less attached to every single thing I wrote because I was producing enough that no one article felt like it was going to define “Megan Alpert, journalist” forever. And while I sometimes cringed at my quick turnarounds, I also got bolder, better able to address issues I cared about, like murdered environmental defenders and refugee detention systems. The constraints that I itched against made me so much better.
When I went back to my novel, I could write more quickly and confidently because I wasn’t held back by fear that every word was stamping me indelibly as a good or bad prose writer. I started to flesh out characters that had been mere ghosts in previous drafts, and to let them take bold action. It was like watching a grey world burst into color all around me. I was running with the ball, feeling the freedom of the wind in my hair as I eyed the goalposts.
Writing, at its best, is play. Working with me as a one-on-one coach—one to two meetings a month—is one way to have someone help you choose which constraints are helping you and which ones have grown stale. Maybe you’ve been playing basketball, but it’s time to play calvinball for a while. Maybe you’re a long-distance runner who needs to learn how to sprint. I can help you choose a direction, set the rules, and play as you build toward your goals.
Want to learn more? Sign up for a free 1:1 intro call with Megan.
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