Kill the Editor

On the End of Literary Prestige

Caspar David Friedrich, The Sea of Ice, 1823-24, Oil on canvas

Twelve years ago, editors at The Paris Review held an open Q&A session on Reddit. One user asked how many unsolicited submissions the magazine receives on average in a period. The editors said around 15,000 a year. In response to a related question, they also disclosed that they rarely accept any manuscripts in the unsolicited category, affectionately referred to as the slush pile. For the most part, the slush pile is read by interns who pass along their favorites to be ignored by the editors. Unless you have a supremely well-connected agent or you commandeer George Plimpton’s corpse for a Weekend at Bernie’s style gesticulatory endorsement, if you submit a story or poem or essay to The Paris Review, you won’t be published, you won’t enjoy a working relationship with a world-class editor, your prose will mold without that premium-grade varnish, that vaunted seal of craftsmanship that only a rigorous editor can give, you won’t be invited to parties in New York City, you may be forced to submit your slush to small presses, or, worst of all, you’ll sink all the way down to the level of Substack, living out the rest of your days writing rude essays like a bucktoothed yahoo. So why worry about prestige publications?

I have about the same chance of publishing my work in The Paris Review as getting struck by lightning while being inaugurated as the Pope. But according to one Substack user Rhi, I should devote more time and energy to forcing my way into legacy print publications like The Paris Review, Vogue, the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement. Here is the full text:

to any aspiring writer of literary and cultural criticism who is reading this… get off substack. buy and read the times literary supplement, the london review of books, the paris review, the london magazine, granta.... or even scroll through lit hub and electric literature. please, for the love of god, don’t let a platform based on an algorithm and uninterrogated personal essays replace literary publications with professional editors and writers who will give you constructive criticism and feedback and a diversity of opinion.

a few of these websites and publications openly advertise their submissions to everyone and even pay you (albeit a small amount) please support this so it continues!

joan didion perfected her personal essays at vogue under the scathing and brilliant editor allene talmey, you will not achieve the same by only reading and writing here.

The advice isn’t just encouragement to read these magazines, which I have no inherent problem with, nor is it to go for the long shot with publication opportunities, which I also don’t mind. Submit your work all over the place, however unlikely the odds of acceptance; I enjoy wasting my time in a number of ways, why not. But to give an order to get off Substack, primarily because of its lack of editorial oversight or firm top-down standards, as if there’s an urgent and exclusive choice between legacy publications and online platforms, as if a writer will necessarily cripple his potential unless he works with an expert editor, is to mischaracterize the present state of letters and also anachronize the greater part of the history of literature.

Now it may seem as if I’m picking on a random person, but I consider this one of those sweet teachable moments. I’m not arguing that this person holds any outsized influence or power in themselves, or that they’ve committed the thought crime of the century, but they’re roughly representing a viewpoint, a critical attitude toward Substack, articulated with varying degrees of condescension, summarized in like fashion: the writing on Substack is generally lower quality than the writing put out by traditional publishing, as Substack has no submission process, built-in editing resources or relationships, and no institutionally upheld standards or consistency in style, tone, etc.

It’s true that on Substack, virtually anyone can publish anything. Terrible writers can dump their drivel and good writers can get away with slacking. No one’s going to tell them no, or to quit sandbagging and beat it. I can’t remember the names of the nerds who run the platform, but they exercise no control or influence over the quality of the writing. On the grounds of free speech alone, their hands-off ethic combined with their early strategy of courting controversial writers already upsets many people who feel as if the platform is something of a playground for Nazis and misogynists, miscellaneous bigots and other unsavory sorts. Add in all the unaccredited upstarts with their uninterrogated essays and their little independent publications, somehow generating interest and enthusiasm and publishing deals, with some of the especially audacious daring to name and reflect on their movements and scenes, and it’s no surprise that some panties have twisted themselves into corkscrews.

From where I’m sitting, the defense of traditional publishing’s fine writerly polish seems a little dependent on bright spots of the past; on the surface this makes sense, as writing transcends death, so why not point to certain canonized authors in arguing for the value of legacy standards and working relationships with editors. But we’re talking about choices faced by living writers, today. Notice in the above-quoted note, Rhi brings up Joan Didion writing at Vogue as an example of how proper guidance from a skilled editor elevates the craft of the essay. Forgive me an impoliteness, but why not mention someone currently writing at Vogue? Didion wrote for the magazine from 1956 to 1964. What’s Vogue been up to lately? I’ll wait for someone to educate me.

At this moment, I’m not saying that all the current writing at Vogue is pure garbage (maybe it is, not sure), just that a writer trying to make it today can’t write for a dead editor in 1964. He has to write for Vogue now, and if he lacks resources, institutional ins, he’s not getting anywhere, and even if he does, he’ll be writing for a small crew of insiders, which isn’t that different from what’ll happen if he writes on Substack.

A writer without a pedigree is more likely to create an audience and attract the attention of publishers, agents, critics, other writers and media figures by writing on Substack than spending all his time submitting to legacy publications and trying to secure a rare working relationship with a ruthless editor. Now, most likely, most people won’t build much of anything on Substack either, because there’s no solving the foundational problem of democratic dilution, where the quantity of written material greatly exceeds available attention, accolades and economic support. But as bleak as it may be, it’s better to be read by fifty people scattered around the world who genuinely like your work than to be read by a college kid who executes a bank shot into a wastebasket with your wadded up manuscript.

Of special salience in the legacy counter-critique of accessible publishing platforms is the figure of the editor and the assumptions held by its advocates. The editor has emerged relatively recently in the history of letters as a guarantor of quality and consistency, of grammatical and structural soundness. Where there’s a proper editor, there’s professional, finished prose. Though a writer earns the bulk of the attention, creates a name for themselves, they can’t reach the highest level of craft without the shadowy or puppeteering influence of an editor.

The standard strike against underground, self-published, small-press writing is that it needs an editor, or a better, more stringent one, because the right eye, or the right agglomeration of eyeballs, will necessarily set a house of fiction or nonfiction in order. But ambiguities and uncertainties of editing explode the second we move past the hectoring refrain. To begin, there are many senses in which prose could be described as bad, and many senses in which a plot might not work or might not satisfy prevailing taste. Enforcing industry standard grammar isn’t the same as dictating euphony or deciding on clarity versus ambiguity, simplicity versus complexity or sincerity versus irony, or maintaining genre boundaries or rules of decorum.

Mainstream, Big Five publishing is often derided for poor writing, but different things are meant by this; sometimes the focus is more technical or factual, and the claimed issue is that the writing is grammatically sloppy, that its imagery clashes, or that it bungles historical details and scientific and philosophical concepts. Sometimes technique is approved, but the prose is criticized for being purple, manipulative, trite or flawed in a more expanded sense that borders on the emotional and moral. Books like Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! teem with cornball pandering and hurdy-gurdy pseudo profundities, but they were supposedly treated to highly-paid editing by the best in the business. Maybe there’s no pronoun confusion in the prose of Vuong and Akbar, but if I were the editor of their books I wouldn’t use a red pen, I’d use a flamethrower.

Going back just a little farther into the past, many of the more famous and still (somewhat) school-approved masters of literature who worked with editors in the short-lived heyday of editing are now used as examples of writers in need of editing. Faulkner was edited; so were Thomas Wolfe and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Though each of them still represent great, timeless writing, they have plenty of detractors, many of whom criticize their prolixity, preciousness, and their confusing or boring plots. Not only are editors specialized clerical workers specific to a historical mode of artistic production, the very standard of what qualifies as good editing is clearly unstable.

While I’m willing to admit that many writers could benefit from sharper and more critical editing, I must remind everyone that the role of the editor crystallized in the popular imagination is a tenuous outcome of historical and technological forces, largely dependent on the scale of operations and the quantity of output of industrial publishing in a mass society. The capital E editor arises from a rapid increase in organizational complexity and its attendant specialization and division of labor, when large publishing houses, magazines and newspapers required expert management in the relative standardization of their cultural and intellectual products. For all that an editor can do to improve a manuscript or alter it to suit certain tastes and preferences, the editorial function is by no means intrinsic to literature or writing more broadly conceived.

It’s tough to get precise information on this topic, but from what I can tell, a considerable volume of writing throughout much of recorded history was written without editorial control as we now understand it. We can reasonably assume that for as long as people have been writing, there have been forms of feedback, suggestion, reaction, correction and then adjustment and counterargument and reworking of letters through private correspondence and public discussion, but then we can also reasonably assume that a considerable portion of accomplished works of literature never passed through more formal editing and drafting processes or collective decision-making procedures in a mass-market context.

Here I’d also like to distinguish between editing as work that can be done by an experienced reader and writer and the personality or identity of the editor in the contemporary sense. The editor as a type often gels into a grating, obtrusive aggrandizer. Much like vegans and guys who’ve gone to prison, you don’t have to ask if someone’s an editor, they’ll be sure to let you know, repeatedly. And the figure of the editor is all too often casually invoked in criticism of apparently superfluous or digressive writing, with smug references to red pens (what is it with these people and the red pen fixation), as if the heart of literature — if there is such a thing — lies in earning a good grade from a schoolteacher squinting over an essay, colored markers in hand. The mania for efficiency and precision in literature is a bit peculiar; it’s as if leisurely and profligate artists take rationalistic, industrial and commercial values more seriously than scientists and businessmen, even as said artists make almost no money for their rigorous and pure prose. Do you know how entrepreneurs and psychologists write? It’s 99 percent packing peanuts, and they get paid for it. There’s something almost artful about it.

The flourishing of European science, independent thought and literature roughly classified as the Republic of Letters occurred largely on the strength of the printing press and the formation of literary societies and scientific academies, and was marked by debate over ideas and criticism of articles, essays, books and journals, but there was no structurally singular role of editor as we understand it today, who subjected written works to a fairly schematic act of textual tidying. Similarly, what’s often understood as the rise of the novel in a conventional European sense, taking place in this Enlightenment period, was also free from the influence of editors or the standard image of mass-scale literary production models and working relationships.

The more you expand the historical and geographical context of literature, the less the editor looms as a necessary, disciplining figure, and the less integral he seems to be in fixing a crisis of writing, if there is such a thing, which I’m inclined to doubt. If there is a crisis, it more narrowly concerns the waning prestige and power of institutions and practices that are far from immemorial. The continued prevalence of references to the supposed need for editors reflects a heightened state of anxiety, a desire for an assurance that good writing can be guaranteed if it’s submitted to institutional processes overseen by experts. As the middle-class reading public contracts in an economic sense and is fractured and subdivided by other media, mass-market publishing with its hierarchical structure and formalized literary production model must give way to more modulated and anarchic subcultural spheres increasingly made up of participants or producers rather than consumers and critics.

When an industry becomes prohibitively insular and peripheral, it’s only natural that the excluded will seek out other channels and form networks of their own and use other tools and resources to organize and communicate. They’ll exaggerate their own cohesion, and their promotional efforts are likely to attract positive and negative attention. Any alternative movement to the mainstream will reproduce certain characteristics of what it counters, misrepresent itself and stimulate incompatible interpretations of its substance and its potential. With self-consciously styled independent publishing ventures such as those found on Substack, it’s a little rich to argue that their inflated self-importance and backscratching insularity obscure problems of craftsmanship. As opposed to what? As opposed to what right now, not 1964 or 1920 or 1890. The blurbs on mainstream releases, mostly by other authors and journalists of traditional institutions, create the impression that readers of said books experience nirvana on every page. They usually don’t.

Many people, including myself, are economically, culturally and temperamentally incapable of breaking into mainstream publishing outfits or working with prestigious editors. In such an exclusive situation with scarce resources, what else will people do but look to make their way elsewhere or at least get more for their hobbies and interests than a rising pile of rejection emails? The lament over inadequate editing and the publishing free-for-all of online platforms sometimes sounds as if an obstinate or insubordinate choice is being made in favor of low standards, when it’s just as much a matter of necessity as it is one of preferring less restrictive and protracted modes of publishing. I’m not turning down lunch dates with Maxwell Perkins so I can mail in my own work to an audience of drooling rubes. The only reason I’ve been able to publish physical books is free blogging. I have to work a job whether I’m published or not; I’d rather be read than pretend I’ll someday write for Vogue and have my prose improved by a woman born in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Closely related to the line of thought on how writers who use accessible publishing platforms are low-class slobs or cheap grifters who need their knuckles busted by ruling editors — and in the same class as the ahistorical conceptualization of the editor — is the lazy yet provocative style of argument about how a certain type of person is missing from literature or is at least not featured in prestige publications or author lists, which suggests something about that type and the current literary culture. The surest way not to find something is not to bother looking. If you’re Jacob Savage, you can really dive into the archives and ask a few of your more literary friends what they think, and from there you can produce a sweeping report on contemporary literature and ask offensive questions about who’s capable of doing what. Savage recently wrote the latest version of what I’d like to characterize in mock interrogative form as “why isn’t there more of something I’m not trying to find” or “why isn’t this one particular identity creating universal literature that captures the present in its totality — by which I mean a lifeless and hackneyed caricature of internet-inflected intersectional politics and heavily overreported experiences that obviously play on trite grievances, in which done-to-death psychosexual dramas between contrived images of people based on crude demographics are staged for the assumption-reinforcing pleasure of dullards who lose track of who they are and what the world is like the moment their eyes slide off a screen.”

Savage’s essay in Compact, “The Vanishing White Male Writer,” asks why there are no young, white straight men in a series of recent notable authors lists, awards and fellowships, and gathers from this absence, besides the usual suspicion about institutional bias, that young straight white men are self-censoring, mostly out of fear, and that they’re no longer capable of describing the world around them. Such a statement reflects a stagnant outlook on what counts as a worthwhile and original description of the world and the vocation of a writer or the possible uses and practices of literature; a particular individual who’s no longer capable of describing the world beyond stale identity categories and midcentury mass-market publishing standards quickly concludes that an entire class of people is dumbfounded and browbeaten because they’re missing from lists no one has heard of or thinks about. What world can young straight white men no longer describe, exactly? The world as it’s already represented on the internet, where everyone already describes what’s happening to them constantly as if they were their own greaseball copywriting diaristic sociologist?

If you define literature by the standards of institutions, publications and artistic identities losing their sway in a commercial condition of niche markets and fractured audiences and semi-democratic platform publishing, then you might hold a distorted idea of why a specific class might write on certain subjects, or why they might be promoted or intentionally overlooked by a marginalized mainstream literary culture. Criticism of small-scale writers, online platforms and small-press publishing outfits almost invariably shows its exhausted creativity and rotting frame, toothlessly referring to Philip Roth, John Updike, Don DeLillo, The New Yorker, writing stipends and book advances again and again, as if everything that counts as literature can be subsumed under a 75- to 100-year period of wide-circulation, sophisticated cultural commentary and mass-market paperback individualistic social realism, i.e., mid- to high-brow Cold War diversion that came of age when aspirational classes had stronger literary pretensions before visual media completely blew their brains out.

Questions of who or what is in The New Yorker or The Paris Review or who has a deal with Knopf and why are irrelevant and uninteresting. No publishing deal or sweet featured article by anyone of any identity will change the fact that all these publications and major presses and awards and lists are extremely unlikely to support an independent writing career, and even if they do, those writers will mostly write for small, specialized audiences with niche tastes, consisting largely of other writers. Savage weakly mocks the insignificance of releasing a novel to 137 Substack followers, revealing a profoundly inadequate appreciation of the motives of an artist or the worth of art. Culture only registers, so to speak, if it’s common, if it covers considerable ground and constitutes a mass phenomenon; but if that’s so, then it’s not only young straight white men suffering from deficits in cognition, courage, ambition and reach, and it’s not only writers, but consumers and critics as well.

Sam Pink, a mainstay of underground literature, has been published in The Paris Review. I can’t say with 100 percent certainty, but I’m pretty sure he still works in the service industry. Bud Smith published a novel with Vintage and he still works in heavy construction. If you don’t already have money, you’re not going to make it in traditional publishing. And you’re not going to earn any more attention or respect or even a different caliber of criticism if you concentrate on putting out work on platforms with ready accessibility and a messy, democratic atmosphere. Either way, you’ll be suspected of glad-handing your way to minuscule influence and money by competitors and grumbling onlookers. So why write at all? There are many valid reasons, but the one that’s often overlooked is fun; write because it’s enjoyable. It’s fun to be read, too; fun to be recognized for who you are and mistaken for what you’re not, to debate and criticize and throw your weight behind the establishment of new standards that will soon be overthrown and then rediscovered.

Caleb Caudell lives in the Midwestern United Sates. His published work is available through Bonfire Books and on Amazon.