Etc.

Stet?

Stet?

In which we invite Melissa Pritchard to discuss the editing process from the author's point of view.

My Italian-made wax anatomies inform me that the excisions I performed upon them with Anne McPeak, my editor, fell somewhere between that deceptively gentle war term, “skirmish,” and a made-up horticultural phrase, “the amputative prune.” Were “Ecorche” a medieval knight’s armor, it would have been hammered and beaten until it had assumed a proper fit. Were the story a tree, it would have bled a bucket of sap. Like two masked, bantering surgeons, editor and author took to the story’s sequences and images with cool, scapular zeal, our shared intent to shape the piece into a pleasing near perfection. What this required of the author (me) was radical humility and emotional detachment. What it required of the editor (Anne) was meticulous attention to detail and an equally radical patience.

I admit with “Ecorche,” I had handed Anne a daunting task. My early vision of the story was that it would be messy, unconventional in shape and direction, it would resemble the messy internal landscape, the tangled viscera, of the human body. I wanted it to be un-neat, compellingly ugly; I had a “form follows function” approach. And although she didn’t know it, her task was made harder by the fact that I had read the original version, some five pages longer than it is now, to an audience of writers at Seattle Pacific University’s MFA Program, who had praised it extravagantly. Thus her suggestions for aligning the piece, cutting certain phrases and sections, were initially met with a stony, internal resistance I managed (I think) to hide.

After all, I understood editing. I respected editors. They see the story more objectively than you do, even as they love it with equal tenderness. Having never had a bad editorial experience, I easily praised editors, talked about getting one’s ego out of the way, stepping back in order to realize the best story, while working humbly with the editor. The truth was, no one had done terribly much to any of my stories or novels. Nothing drastic; tweakings, tweezerings.

Until Anne.

What? Take out my lovingly rendered description of the handsome Italian anatomist, Clemente Susini, upon whom I had a hopeless crush? NO! My hard-worked portrait of the Director, Felice Fontana (who knew himself to be a prim, fastidious dresser, not in the least handsome…. His earliest ambitions had couched and concentrated themselves in bold knots of bone above each of his eyebrows, and with his bald, glabrous head marred by a claret stain, priapic in shape…)? NO! Remove minutely researched details of the ceroplastics studio, the process of making these wax figures (the anatomist was rolling out a flat sheet of kneaded wax darkened with cinnabar and mixed with madder-tinted lacquer to match the color of kneaded muscle…)? NO! Let go the mesmerizing detail of eight hundred wax figures being hauled by mules across the snowy Alps to the Austrian Emperor’s Josephinum (Vienna’s Academy of Military Surgeons)? NO! NO! NO! Et cetera.

Years ago, in the process of a divorce, I moved out of my home to house sit in someone else’s home, his second home, just purchased and largely unfurnished.
I brought a minimum of possessions with me: clothes, a few books. Months later, with the divorce complete, I moved my things out of my former home and was shocked to realize how little I had missed the majority of my possessions—many of them I had completely forgotten about. It was a profound lesson in what was truly important, in that case my two children, my health, my ability to read, to write, and to begin to reshape a better, truer life for myself.

It occurs to me that this is much the same with editing, if one views editing as a kind of hidden divorce, a prying away from the author’s original version of a story (herself). As I read the beautifully honed and meticulously shaped version of Ecorche that now appears in the pages of A Public Space #11, I don’t miss what isn’t there. And had I not been writing this column, I would have completely forgotten the precious descriptions and lopsided bits of narrative I had once been so adamantly attached to (though it is nice to retrieve, and peripherally reinstate, these descriptions above!).

What remains is what matters, and what remains, thanks to Anne’s intelligent, patient eye for detail and my own uneasy exercise in detachment, is a story we are committed to and proud of in its final version.


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