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Dear AuthorOctober 05, 2007 What I really want to know is, why did you submit this unbelievably disorganized, endlessly repetitive, frequently muddled, and terminally vague manuscript to your publisher? Yeah, I know you were on deadline -- I know about deadlines, I do deadlines all the time. My deadline for your manuscript is Monday, and I promise, it'll be outta here on Monday and back in the publisher's hands by Tuesday. Don't be shocked when you see page after page bathed in red pencil. Query after query after query -- how many ways can one say in English "Meaning not clear -- confusing -- what does this mean? -- wasn't all this said on page 126"? I'm a writer too. I know an early draft when I see one. An early draft is when you let whatever's in your head flow through your fingers: points you want to make, anecdotes you want to tell, quotes you think are particularly pithy, and so on. And on and on. When it's all on the paper -- or the computer screen, but I still like paper, mainly because I have a hard time making circles and arrows and big red Xes on my computer screen -- then you start rasslin' it into shape. ("Rasslin'" isn't a word I use all that often. "Wranglin'" is more my style; I'm not a cowboy, but I do hang around horses. Jesse Ventura is mentioned in your book, so "rasslin'" just came through my fingers.) You discover your main points, not all of which were necessarily in whatever outline you made to show to your agent, then you marshal the stories and arguments and quotes you need to make each one -- stories and arguments and quotes that are currently scattered across several chapters -- and organize them into a reasonably coherent narrative. I know an early draft when I see one, and this is an early draft. Do you know an early draft when you see one? I suspect so. A couple of chapters in, I was dying to know who was getting away with this, so I Googled your name. Turns out that not only are you fairly well respected in your field, you've already written a couple of books (or a couple of books have been published with your name on the cover). But even if you don't realize that this goddamn book isn't done yet, your editor has to know it -- that is, if your editor bothered to read it. I hear that there are more and more commercial-press editors these days who are too overworked to do justice to the books they acquire, and it also occurs to me that if a hypothetical editor were assigned a book that he or she hated, letting it go into the world in the condition yours is in might qualify as passive resistance. If this happened to me, know what (I hope) I'd do? Grab my editor around the throat and say, "I'm pulling this book out of production. I'm breaking the contract? Fine. Sue me. Or you can edit it the way it should have been edited in the first place. So what if it comes out in June instead of January?" You would be doing your editor and your publisher a huge favor, believe me. The current publication date could come and go and y'all would still be able to look yourselves and each other in the eye. What bugs me worse than anything is the niggling suspicion that you will be able to look yourselves and each other in the eye even if the book comes out in its current state, or the state it'll be in after you've addressed my myriad queries. (Assuming, of course, that you don't stroke out when you see the copyedited manuscript.) That's genuinely distressing. It's genuinely distressing because it strongly suggests that books don't matter even to the people who write and produce them. Among writers, editors, and readers who've so far been unable to excise or exorcise our passion for the written word, this fear is not new. We have somewhat reconciled ourselves to the fact that trivial books will be published on trivial subjects because they sell, and thus keep the publisher in business. But a flat-out bad book on a subject that matters to many people? This ratchets the distress up a notch or two. Especially when it's so obvious that with a month or so of intense work the book could have been pretty good. I'll spare you my rant on how demoralizing it is to work on a manuscript that no one upstream seems to give a shit about. True, I'm getting paid relatively well for this gig. But though most of us know that burning $20 and $50 and $100 bills is stupid unless you're filthy rich, many of us don't stop to think that wasting dozens and dozens of hours is just as dumb unless your time is unlimited. Mine isn't. The money compensates me somewhat for the loss of the hours, sure, but nowhere near enough, and doing a job, any job, just for the money rots the spirit. The odds are about a thousand to one that you'll do the right thing, but here's hoping anyway. Sincerely yours,
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