The Editor Who Deleted Herself

There was an editor of some standing in the small world of literary publishing who had spent thirty years quietly making other people's books better. She was famous, in the trade, for her red pencil — not for its severity, which was the usual editorial reputation, but for its accuracy. She cut only what needed cutting. Writers came out the other side of her edits saying, more often than not, that she had made them sound more like themselves, which is the highest compliment an editor is offered and one of the rarest to deserve.

In the thirtieth year, on a wet Sunday, she took a manuscript out of the drawer where she had kept it, unfinished, for eleven years. It was her own novel. She had written the first hundred pages of it in her late thirties. She had, in the intervening eleven years, written not one further sentence of it, though she had, in that same period, edited approximately forty other people's novels to publication.

She reread the hundred pages. They were, she saw with a professional clarity that startled her, quite good. Not great. Not embarrassing. They were the beginning of a real book, the kind of book she would have taken on as an editor and worked patiently to bring out. She sat with this recognition for a long time. Then she took her red pencil and began, on her own manuscript, doing what she had done for other people for thirty years.

She cut. She questioned. She wrote small, tart marginal notes to herself. 'Vague.' 'You know better.' 'This is a paragraph you wrote to avoid writing the next paragraph.' By evening she had turned the hundred pages into eighty. The eighty were, she saw, much closer to the book that had wanted, all along, to be written. The trouble had not been that she could not write. The trouble had been that she could not, for eleven years, bear to be edited by the only editor good enough to edit her.

The harder revision, in the weeks that followed, was not on the page. It was in her calendar. She had, without meaning to, arranged her thirty years of work so that there was, in any given week, no unbroken hour in which she was not editing someone else. It was easier to serve other people's manuscripts than to face her own. She began, gently, to cut her own diary the way she had cut her own pages. She said no to two anthologies. She turned down a prize committee. She kept, on Sunday afternoons, an hour that belonged only to her book. The book, released after two years of Sundays, was widely and warmly received. She said, in the one interview she gave, that the most difficult edit of her career had been to her own week.

There is a version of this problem in every generous life. We become skilled at making other people's things better, and the skill becomes, over years, a very convenient excuse for not making our own thing at all. The manuscript in the drawer is not asking to be perfect. It is asking to be, at last, given a Sunday. Take the red pencil to your own calendar first. The rest of the revision will follow.