between Writers and Editors
It's been two years.
And here in my Washington Heights apartment I am a freelance writer, editor, researcher, translator, taking classes with the Times' Sam Tannenhaus and Dorothy Wickenden of The New Yorker as a fellow at the Writer's Institute @ the CUNY Grad Center. But i'm also looking for a full-time job in publishing. Ideally, of course, at FSG or Knopf, where I'd get to read manuscripts by the likes of Andrew Sean Greer and Andre Aciman, maybe even edit them, and hope to spot out the next big literary lights in the piles of unsolicited manuscript submissions sitting on an all-important and very busy editor's desk.
Is this a mistake, I wonder, weeks, even months, after emailing resumes and cover letters to what seems like everyone out there--oxford, harper, simon&schuster, random house (and its ridiculous number of divisions and imprints), penguin, little brown, cambridge, and macmillan (which owns the much coveted FSG)--do I really want to be typing up rejection letters, reading other people's good, even excellent manuscripts, slaving away as an editor on someone else's work of genius, while my own creative imagination begins to dissipate, slow but so steady, as semicolons and red ink become my area of expertise while the characters I invented long ago but had no courage to put to paper, start to drift further and further away from me, until i can no longer relate to these figaments of my own mind.
What is it that differentiates us critics and editors from the writers we write about and whose work we polish and fine-tune. Is it possible to somehow bridge the divide and be both a great editor and an extraordinary writer? Or must one choose between the two?
And here in my Washington Heights apartment I am a freelance writer, editor, researcher, translator, taking classes with the Times' Sam Tannenhaus and Dorothy Wickenden of The New Yorker as a fellow at the Writer's Institute @ the CUNY Grad Center. But i'm also looking for a full-time job in publishing. Ideally, of course, at FSG or Knopf, where I'd get to read manuscripts by the likes of Andrew Sean Greer and Andre Aciman, maybe even edit them, and hope to spot out the next big literary lights in the piles of unsolicited manuscript submissions sitting on an all-important and very busy editor's desk.
Is this a mistake, I wonder, weeks, even months, after emailing resumes and cover letters to what seems like everyone out there--oxford, harper, simon&schuster, random house (and its ridiculous number of divisions and imprints), penguin, little brown, cambridge, and macmillan (which owns the much coveted FSG)--do I really want to be typing up rejection letters, reading other people's good, even excellent manuscripts, slaving away as an editor on someone else's work of genius, while my own creative imagination begins to dissipate, slow but so steady, as semicolons and red ink become my area of expertise while the characters I invented long ago but had no courage to put to paper, start to drift further and further away from me, until i can no longer relate to these figaments of my own mind.
What is it that differentiates us critics and editors from the writers we write about and whose work we polish and fine-tune. Is it possible to somehow bridge the divide and be both a great editor and an extraordinary writer? Or must one choose between the two?
posted by shoshana at 2:22 PM
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