I do understand, believe me, that early praise can make later criticism less bitter; nevertheless, it’s not my job as an editor to be particularly easy on writing—not yours and epecially not mine. My job, rather, is to poke a writer’s work in myriad places to discover where its wounds have been bandaged well and where it’s bleeding profusely. Sometimes I find that the work’s just ticklish. I poke it, it giggles; still, I poke it more, sometimes a little harder than I should just to make sure. Those works are pleasures. They also are rare. Decapitations and amputees can be unpleasant to see, but they’re at least easy to diagnose and, generally, easy for a writer to fix—they either start the process of writing a new head, or after rummaging around in the morgue they discover a leg or an arm that can be reused, and the whole is usually the better for it. The worst cases are when all a work’s fingers and toes have been cut off at one time or another and left scattered or even patched back together with little more than scotch tape. It’s not that any one of the injuries is bad in itself; rather, it’s that all of them together compound the work’s pain such that even the slightest effort to figure out where to begin makes it scream in pain. In no small way it’s death by papercut, and unfortunately, there is no fixing it by privileging a thumb over a pinky: both have to be ripped off and both sewn back on in their respective proper places. When I get one of these, it’s hard not to want it to be DOA, and I wonder how the writer isn’t ashamed of not having done better. Such is an awful time to be an editor, especially to be one who hasn’t the luxury of rejecting a writer’s work. It’s difficult not to resent the piles upon piles of extremities and the yards of tape in which I am left standing by the end. I imagine it’s difficult, too, on the writer’s part, not to resent his editor for being so exacting. But there are few things that I am more certain of than that a writer’s work will be better for my having read it, so I never apologize for the bloody mess. Nor do I take pride in it, which is my definition of the difference between confidence and arrogance. Instead, I hand it back, explain what I can, and hope that, if I see the work again, the writer either took my advice or, after rejecting it, found another way to make the work whole. What I dread most is to think that the writer might ignore my work altogether, might go away and retape its fingers and toes much as they had been taped before. More than being rejected, being ignored feels like a repudiation of my time, my effort, me—and I try not to think of it.

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