“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is...For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.” - William Blake
I built a front door for camp last weekend. Step one involved pulling some moderately dry 2x12s off the pile of rough cut lumber we’re working from and planing them. Step two involved ripping them down with the help of my partner, G. She worked in a woodshop when she was younger and has a real good mind for detail, which means she’s often conscripted, like it or not, into these kinds of projects. We routed out channels in the board edges and cut splines so they fit together. We glued the edges and clamped the whole thing, then block-planed the joints and outer edges so we had an aesthetically pleasing and mathematically true rectangle. Sanded, poly’ed. The whole thing looks great.
About two swallows into our self-congratulatory beers I remembered how wood moves and thought: oh crap, we shouldn’t have glued those joints. I looked up this story that we’ve published on the subject, which only confirmed my fears. I talked to two accomplished woodworkers about it and both agreed I messed up. One suggested ripping the whole thing apart, regrooving, and reassembling with no glue and additional space in the channel for the spline to move. The other suggested I leave off the Z-shaped backing board we were planning on using to reinforce it, hanging it, and seeing what happens. In a worst case scenario we could rip it apart and do it right, but we might get away with little tweaks that wouldn’t require anything so dramatic.
I’m going to keep the hardware easy to remove and go with option B. The next step will be asking a carpenter friend to help me hang the door in a way that accounts for expansion. With luck, by November, camp will have a handsome front door that opens easily and closes tightly.
I’m sure you have your own version of this story – hopefully a lifetime worth of them. This is, after all, humanity at its best. Someone has a spark, a vision, an idea, and they pursue it. And they enlist help from people who are more experienced than they are to make the project the best it can be. And they screw up because you always screw up. But you power through and learn and tweak and will the thing to work. I am aware that this door may blow up on its hinges and I may have to start all over again. But if it happens, I will. And I’ll keep enlisting help from others until I get it right. And eventually, by jingles, I’ll have my triumphant Norm Abram moment where somebody says “cool door,” and I’ll think: yup; I built that.
If you’ll humor a cathartic turn in the narrative, I’d like to complain about work now. I shared the door story because it serves as an organic counterpoint to how inorganic it can be for an editor to work with a green writer.
I just had a story fall through on me for the winter issue. The writer submitted an essay that was overwritten and really didn’t say much of anything. I could see a spark, though. And the writer had a talent for photography. I proposed a new approach that could, theoretically, lead to a publishable piece. The writer submitted a revision that was on the right track. I gave it a pretty heavy edit to make it readable and logical and asked for a few more details. Then came the dreaded email that we sometimes get in this business, where the writer rejects the edits on artistic grounds. Saying it no longer sounded right; using the term “my voice” and the phrase “I’m an artist.” The game ended with both of us having wasted a lot of time and the camp doesn’t have a front door.
To be clear, an editor meddling with a writer’s voice can be a real problem. I’ve been the writer who’s been needlessly meddled with, and in sloppy moments, I’ve been the meddling editor. The way this works professionally is you have a back and forth with the writer, you smooth things out in a way that makes everyone happy, and you move on.
None of this “voice” stuff applies, though, to a piece that’s fundamentally and functionally flawed. And many young writers that I’ve worked with over the years have a real problem grasping this distinction. I think in a lot of places writing gets taught as art in school, which in some cases is making these kids unemployable. Maybe poetry is art – akin to a Jeff Koons sculpture or a paint-splattered Jackson Pollock canvas – a medium where the process and the creation trump accessibility and functionality. But journalism, magazine writing, it’s not that. It’s more akin to fine woodworking. At the very least every piece needs to be functional. It needs to fit into a box, literally and metaphorically. At best, it’s functional and beautiful.
If you’re a teacher reading this, I beg you to look critically at your curriculum and ensure that writing’s being taught not just as an artistic expression of self but as craft and labor; that kids are leaving school with writing skills that can be practically applied to the real world. And if you’re a young writer with a chip on your shoulder, I’d ask you to take your favorite book and look at the acknowledgements section. Look at all of those people the author felt compelled to thank. Every published work is a collaborative effort – it is just like building a door. Solicit help. Be grateful for help. If you did something wrong, rip it apart and build it again. Use the collective to make the piece as strong as it can be.
It’s very kind of you to let me vent.
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