editing

5 Things to Do before Approaching an Editor

February 4, 2014 By Erin Beasley

Asking an editor to take on your work is not like turning in a paper to a college professor. In college, you might have been able to write something at the last minute and turn it in for a passing grade. It isn’t like that with a professional editor. A professional editor – be that a copy editor or a developmental editor – is going to put your work beneath a microscope. He or she won’t let you get away with inconsistencies or mistakes because the goal isn’t a passing grade. The goal is a manuscript that you’ll be able to publish – not for free or for your mom and her five friends but for money, preferably a lot of it.

Write First. Edit Later.

January 21, 2014 By Erin Beasley

Numerous years of writing academic papers, essays, poems, blog posts, white papers, et cetera, have taught an important lesson: write first and edit later. The initial words must flow. They cannot and should be stopped. They should not be weeded or burned before they come to fruition. They and their weedy counterparts have to go a little wild at first so that the right and good words can be discerned and put to use.

How to be a Better Editor of Your Own Work

January 15, 2014 By Erin Beasley

But the greatest trauma, the necessary wounding that any poet must undergo, is the detachment from her own work. The beginning after the beginning. We must cut ourselves out and off to move toward a sophisticated sense of the art beyond our sense of self, to develop a historical sense, to see that we write in dialogue with the poetry of the past, to see poems as things, material to be manipulated. This is the big divide, what must be stressed again and again and not just in undergraduate workshops. We must risk a loss of passionate connection to distance ourselves from our work, to grow a little cold to it in order to revise, in order to look at a poem as a series of decisions. Why this and not that? We must develop an ability to read our work skeptically. – Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction

Good Writing is like a Bowl of Ice Cream

November 6, 2013 By Erin Beasley

I like ice cream a lot. I take it back. When I say I like ice cream, I mean that I really, really like chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream. I like it so much that I haven’t had it in over a year. If I buy it, I want to eat it all the time. It’s best left as a rare treat so that our amiable relationship can continue.

This is What an Editor Does

September 3, 2013 By Erin Beasley

And now, because I missed the deer whole, I want to cut back the honeysuckle – just enough to see I think. See through.

To more?

To beyond and not here?

I am thinking that cutting can shift a thing – release a space, be a new pattern laid.

That clearing a space is like crafting a question.

Lia Purpura, On Looking

The Words Entrusted to Me

August 22, 2013 By Erin Beasley

I always feel a hesitance when a new writer approaches me. I wonder, “Can I do this? Can I help this writer? Will my insights and questions and thoughts and sometimes tangents be beneficial?” I don’t know, but I take a deep breath and accept the work. [Read more…] about The Words Entrusted to Me

editing

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