I must confess that I’m an accidental writer. I never set out to be a writer; it kind of snuck up on me, and now that I’m nearing the end of my career (not life…geez, let’s not rush things along), I’ve settled in as a writer. I still write for two of the magazines I worked for. I also have my blog, and I am a published author. I just received a royalty check for $1.71 for my book. I need to check where I rank on the New York Times bestseller list. Unfortunately, like most good ideas in Washington, D.C., it just doesn’t register.
What I wanted to be was a cartoonist. I was pretty good at doing caricatures, enjoyed doing it, and thought that was the path I was meant to follow. I even earned the most useless college degree possible, a Fine Arts degree, in pursuit of reaching my goal. I have had cartoons published, but rarely. I created a cartoon strip, but it was used to promote a coffee shop and was published in one local newspaper. I thought it was a pretty good idea, so I submitted the strip to several national newspaper syndicates in hopes of finding a spot next to Peanuts on the daily comic page.
The purpose of these syndicates is to distribute content to publications around the country for a fee. They offer cartoons, columns, crossword puzzles, etc., to publications that can’t afford to generate the same content on their own. I also think syndicates’ other purpose is to deflate the spirit of those who submit pieces for consideration. I’m not saying that the multitude of rejection letters I received were soul-crushing, but why did they have to say those terrible things about my dog?
The truth is (as if I deal in the truth) that most of the rejections were very vanilla, a few positive, but a couple made me hide in my closet for about a month. The one constant was the compliments on the strip’s writing. Being the sharp individual that I am, it went completely over my head, and I kept trudging along, thinking I could be a published cartoonist.
Eventually, I found a career in publishing and found my calling. I was the production manager for a publishing company and was really enjoying what I was doing. Every once in a while, an article needed an illustration to accompany the story, and I would provide it. I could not have been happier until one dark and stormy afternoon (like the dramatic interlude?). My publisher came to me and told me that one of our outside writers was supposed to provide a first-person article and had failed to deliver the piece. He asked me to give it a shot and have it ready by the morning.
OMG! I was transported back to the seventh grade when a nun would give our class a writing assignment. I would completely freeze and go into complete panic. A nun once told me that I would never be able to write my name without making some kind of grammatical error.
I was game, so I gave it a try. Translated, I feared I was going to lose my job, and I should stay up all night and flail at the project. I was given the subject, which should be no longer than a thousand words, and all I had to do was write from my point of view.
I spend the night writing, rewriting, and rewriting even more. Once I was done, I handed it to my wife so she could give me her opinion and point out any errors. She said there was very little to change and that she thought it was good.
Really…naw. I rewrote it several more times and finally gave up. I thought it was a mess and that I would be looking for a new job by the following afternoon.
I turned it in the next morning, and my publisher liked it. He liked it so much that it became a monthly column for the next five years. Additionally, I was assigned to write about local restaurants, a few other small subjects, and then a full-length feature article. I became the magazine’s sports writer. I began wearing a fedora with a tag that said “Press” stuffed in the ribbon and chomping on a cigar. Was that too much?
I still did my job as the production manager and wrote articles in my free time (at night, when I should have been sleeping in my lounge chair in front of some sporting event), but more importantly, I was enjoying the writing.
I would like to take all the credit for my creative writing, but I do have to answer to an editor. An editor is someone who can make a long story short (I heard that on the radio recently). Do they gut the heart and soul of what I have poured into my work? Damn right? Do they give me my article back with so much red ink, it looks like the victim on a television crime show? You bet.
If my editor is reading this, “Only kidding, ha!” Oh, yeah, she reads everything I write.
Without an editor, I would be exposed as the illiterate that I am. The editor is the person who fixes those run-on sentences, dangling participles, misspellings and who tortures me with the Oxford comma. I prefer the good old American comma. Is there such a thing?
When I was in grade school, our nuns taught us a specific way to use commas. Since I now have editors, they have a different opinion on the use of commas. I’ll be honest, I put a comma, in wherever, I can, in an effort,not to piss off the editor. How did I do?
I now have an editing program. Technically, it is an AI program, and I am trying to figure out how to turn off the AI part. The program is excellent at finding little things I missed, but it also spends a lot of time trying to rewrite all my clever musings. Why is my program looking at me funny? It just inserted a threat in my story. When I deleted the danger, it inserted the statement, “I’ll be back.” Should I be concerned?
As an experiment, I let the program rewrite something I wrote, and it reduced it from a full page of hilarious commentary to about two paragraphs, as dry as a piece of old toast. Even though I’m sure it had all its commas in the right place, it had no imagination. Similar to some of the life and blood editors I have worked with in the past. I’m sure they wouldn’t be caught reading what they used to call my dribble.
To conclude (Editor’s note: Thank God!), editors are a good thing like screenwriters. The actors get all the credit, but the screenwriters are the ones who do the real work. I enjoy writing, and I appreciate the editors’ who prevent me from looking like a complete idiot (Another editor’s note: That‘s impossible.).
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