The Editor Is Always Right. Even When She Isn’t

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I just got back my manuscript from my freelance editor. It’s a second draft of a novel set in the 1980s Romania, behind the Iron Curtain, whose main character is an eighteen-year-old Lili coming of age and seeking a home.

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You can read an excerpt here. It’s not the lightest reading, but it happens to be one of those hero-journey points where she senses the right path, but ends up refusing it again: no feelings, stay strong!

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I was happy to hear that I’d got the hero journey right, that the book had a solid structure, and that the worldbuilding, dialogues, and characters were powerful. Well, or let’s say at least interesting. These are major wins between the first and the second draft.

But, there are still some open questions (when aren’t there any?), and I might wish to make some tweaks, the editor adds.

Apart from the fact that her credentials are excellent, I chose her because I related to her no-nonsense writing style. I’ve never liked waffling, and when I discovered her on Medium, I thought, that’s an editor whose opinion I want.

Some of the things she told me I should tweak intrigued me, though.

It’s hard for us, readers, to care about this heroine, because she’s sleepwalking through her life and the narrative voice mirrors that emotional detachment. There’s not much to engage with.

She’s advising me to do things that I deliberately chose not to: put Lili in here-and-now scenes where she needs to articulate her feelings, and make her feel something before she represses it — in a word, get some emotion for the reader.

Whereas I want the reader to experience what it’s like to be Lili: to sense that estrangement, in a hostile world that keeps trying to get you to feel, so it can break you. That’s why important scenes are left out and mentioned on the side (the oh, by the way, Father’s been arrested sort of way). Although she witnessed that, she wasn’t really there.

But hold on, I raise my head and stick up my hand: aren’t so many characters in contemporary literary fiction unremarkable, captured in unremarkable biographies? There are many other protagonists that we may find it – honestly – hard to care about (whether liking or disliking them), but that doesn’t stop their stories from being remarkable.

I’m reading Ian McEwan’s Lessons, and I’m finding it very hard to care about the hero for the most part of the book, but I’m captivated nonetheless. I may wonder where the story is going, and what’s the point, but I carry on reading, without an effort. There’s something there, and I need to dig deeper to spot it: an unremarkable hero with an unremarkable, almost conflict-free life (or the conflicts are not explicitly shown in the story), whose story still captivates.

As I’m approaching the end of the novel, I’m starting to see where McEwan is taking us. And the big picture, yes, it’s totally worthwhile. Along the way, however, the reader must get on with little incentive about the character himself.

But there’s a clue for my own novel: once I have spotted that element that makes McEwan’s book so captivating despite a lame hero, I can turn back to my book and find other ways to make it worthwhile for the reader to carry on through Lili’s story. Will it be the worldbuilding? Other characters’ perceptions of Lili? Some ironical-comical element in the plot? Multiple timelines? A sub-plot?

My editor may be wrong; there are locked-in protagonists who are deliberately placed by their authors in an unengaging mesh of relations (or the lack thereof), but they still drive the story, and the book emerges as remarkable. Her objection to Lili might even suggest double standards: what’s okay for big authors is not okay in Zoe’s writing.

And yet she’s right, in another way: there’s still work I need to put in to make my story go deeper, broader, denser, until Lili’s emotional detachment flips and it becomes moving, touching, gripping for the reader.

Until my Lili gets the depth of McEwan’s hero.

My editor may be raising points I don’t agree with. She may be getting certain things wrong. But on the flip side, it means I didn’t make the “right” message powerful enough.

Maybe I didn’t fail where she thinks, but she’s sensing that I failed somewhere. It’s not so much the what, but the deeper why.

The old saying, the customer’s always right. The customer may well be stupid, unreasonable, an entitled asshole – but they are still right. As long as they object, even preposterously, it means we’re failing them, one way or another.

I’m not saying we should second-guess ourselves each time anyone comes along and doubts our work, our character, our values. But it would be good to run some checks before dismissing their critique.

Have we failed that person? Maybe; but it’s a failure we factored in; or it’s a person we know we’ll never reach. We’ve come to terms with that. Move on.

People are often wrong. But it’s often not about the accuracy of their objections; it’s that we haven’t managed to convince them.

Ways to go from there?

It might be pointless trying to prove them wrong.

Or, we forget about proving anyone wrong, just do the underground work to bring them on our side.

And that’s what I’m going to do about Lili and my editor. It’s pointless to argue that readers might still care for Lili, for all her emotional frigidity. I’ll need to do the underground work to make Lili stand out, powerful enough to be a true heroine.

Third draft on the way.