Nothing Sacred by Yu-Han Chao
My first acceptance came with a condition: “change these words to something else, and we will publish your piece.” I made the change and received my first acceptance letter for an essay about dreams. I had described everything and everyone exactly as I dreamt it, but I figured I could just as well have dreamed something else, so I made the change.
In my experience, sometimes journals publish a piece verbatim, typos and all. Sometimes they make edits. Sometimes they tell me to make specific changes. Sometimes they say, “This part doesn’t work. Do something about it and we’ll have a second look.” Other times, they want me to rewrite the whole story. Some people may think I have no artistic integrity or backbone or respect for myself as a writer or the sacred profession of writing, because I always make the change. I don’t even always get the acceptance in the end after a request for a revision, but I still do it. If I had a business card, it would say, “Will Edit for Publication.” But I wasn’t always so eager to listen to editors, especially after my feelings were hurt during workshop and I trudged home in the snow with that rotten feeling in my stomach, or when a journal told me to rewrite a story about suicide into a story about overcoming one’s fears of a violent ex.
I took a revision workshop one semester at Penn State with the most patient writer I’ve ever known, Charlotte Holmes. After having to revise one story four times, including changing it from first person to third person, then to first person and back to third person again, I realized that a story is as finished as when you stop editing it. It could just as well have been one way as it could have been another, and you can keep rewriting it forever. Everybody’s heard the story of how Flaubert spent a whole afternoon revising a piece, took out a comma, and then the next day put it back in again. And life is full of irony. When a literary journal was interested in publishing the story I’d workshopped and rewritten ad nasuseum, the editor made me revise it yet another time before giving me an acceptance letter.
By this point, I had learned a lesson: a story is never finished—you simply stop. And I do believe that there’s nothing sacred about words (except for maybe T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland or Prufrock, but as long as he was the one who wrote it I’m sure it would be pretty good anyway, and the same goes for Nabokov and Angela Carter).
Yu-Han Chao is Poetry Editor at Rose & Thorn Journal. Her poetry book, We Grow Old, was published by the Backwaters Press. Visit her writing and artwork at her website .
Really enjoyed this. Especially this line which I heartily agree with: "...a story is never finished—you simply stop."
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This is very true. Now I'm off to work on revisions myself.
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I will defend some things to my editor, but there are some I let go -or realize my editor is right, righter than I was right
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I agree. Unless you are writing for your own eyes only, one must consider how the story or poem falls upon one's readership. That is why another pair of eyes, not ayes, is so important to the finsihed product. As is writ, art is something you work at until you stop or simply run out of time.
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that’s a damn good checklist! any chance you could make it into a pdf for us all?
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so amazing!!! this is exactly the kind of stuff i am looking for
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