The Editor Who Rewrote My Ending
The published version is better, and I resent every improved word.
The best sentence ever published under my name was put there by a woman I have met exactly once, and I think about it every day, the way you think about a stone in your shoe.
Two years ago, a small literary magazine accepted an essay of mine about clearing out my father's garden shed after he died. If you have never had the pleasure, a shed is where a certain kind of man stores his entire inner life, organized by jar. The acceptance email was warm and generous, and it contained one sentence I skimmed right past on the first reading: “Some light edits to follow from Maeve.”
Maeve, it turned out, does not do light... Maeve edits the way weather edits coastlines. The proofs arrived three weeks later, not as a document with tracked changes but as paper, actual paper, my essay printed out and marked in pencil and posted to my flat like it was 1987. I did not know literary magazines still did that. I suspect most do not. I suspect Maeve does it because pencil cannot be argued with by return of post.
Most of the marks were small and correct, which was annoying enough. A trimmed clause here, a dead adverb there. My four “suddenly”s, executed in a neat row. Fine. I can lose adverbs; I have lost worse.
Then I reached the final page...
My ending was gone.
Three paragraphs, my favorite three paragraphs, struck through with one long diagonal line, the way you cross out a wrong sum.
You have to understand what those paragraphs were. They were the landing. The essay had walked through the shed jar by jar, shelf by shelf, and then the ending stepped back and told you, gently, in imagery I was frankly proud of, what all of it meant. There was late sunlight coming through the shed window doing something symbolic. There was a line about tools being a language. I had polished those paragraphs the way you polish a trophy, which, it turns out, is exactly what they were.
In their place: an arrow.
One pencil arrow, starting from a sentence buried in the middle of page two, curving down through the entire essay, and landing at the bottom of the last page. Next to it, in handwriting smaller than a screw thread, one word.
“Here.”
The sentence was one I barely remembered writing. It was a plain report, no music in it at all: “He had labeled one jar screws, various, good, and another jar screws, various, not good, and he kept both.” That was to be my new ending. A jar of bad screws.
I wrote Maeve a long email. I composed it over two nights, measured and gracious on the surface, seething underneath, the way a dishwasher is quiet. I explained that the essay earned its final movement. I used the word “resonance.” I quoted my own sunset at her.
Her reply arrived the next morning and was two sentences long. “Your last three paragraphs are you clearing your throat after the speech. The essay ends where the grief is, and the grief is in the jar of bad screws he kept anyway.”
I lost the argument in the time it took to read that twice.
That is the humiliating thing about being edited well: the fury has nowhere to land.
He kept both jars. Even the bad screws. Even the not good, kept, labeled, provided for, because you never know, because throwing a thing away was a violence he could not do to it.
That was my father to the bone. It was the whole essay... It had been the whole essay since page two, and I had walked straight past it into a sunset.
I wrote back one line: “Fine. Your version.” She replied in four words: “My version is your sentence.” Which remains the meanest, truest thing anyone has ever said about my writing.
She did not write a better ending. She found the one I had buried, and I have never entirely forgiven her for being right.
Publication day made it worse. Every message I received quoted the ending back to me. The jars, everyone said, the jars.
My sister read it in her car outside a supermarket and called me in tears: “The bad screws. That's him. That's exactly him.” She had the last page framed. It hangs in her hallway, and every Christmas I walk past Maeve's greatest hit displayed in a house I grew up visiting, and I accept compliments on it like counterfeit money, each one a small coin pressed into my palm in someone else's currency.
For a while I nursed the resentment properly.
Some nights I would open the drafts folder and reread my deleted sunset... the way you check on a houseplant you have been told to stop watering.
But once someone shows you a thing like that about your own writing, you start seeing it everywhere, and I mean everywhere. I went back through years of work. Poem after poem, essay after essay: the truest line sitting in the middle, followed by two stanzas of me backing slowly out of the room, softening, reassuring, landing the plane long after the passengers had already arrived. I reread that essay about why safe poems lose with my ears going hot, because it described every ending I had ever written. I even found it, and I say this with an adult's full shame, in the eulogy I gave for my father. The true sentence was in the middle. I finished on a hymn.
The next spring I took a proper craft course, where I learned there is a name for what I do. The instructor called it writing past the ending, and said most people do it out of kindness, out of wanting to lower the reader gently to the ground. Maeve's pencil had said the same thing in a single arrow: the reader does not need lowering.
The reader needs the jar.
These days I have a ritual. Before I send anything anywhere, to a magazine, to a monthly poetry contest, to anyone whose opinion I fear, I print the final page and ask one question: where would the arrow go?
I hate that I always know.
I met her once, at a book fair, behind the magazine's folding table. She was smaller than her pencil marks, somewhere in her seventies, drinking tea from a thermos lid. I introduced myself, and I had a whole speech prepared about gratitude and growth. She looked at me for a moment.
“The screws,” she said, and shook my hand.
“That's me.”
“Are you still writing past your endings?”
“Sometimes.”
“Well,” she said, refilling the thermos lid, “at least now you know when you're doing it.” That was the entire meeting. I have had shorter conversations that gave me less to think about, but not many.
I kept the proofs. All of them, but especially the last page. Some nights, stuck at the end of a draft, I take it out and look at that pencil arrow, the confidence of it, one unbroken curve from the middle of my essay to the bottom of my page, and the single word waiting there in her small grey handwriting. And I resent it... I want that on the record. I resent that the best word on any page of mine is one syllable, in pencil, in someone else's hand.
I kept the jars too, by the way. Screws, various, good. Screws, various, not good. They sit on the shelf above my desk, in his handwriting, and when an ending is not working I look up at the bad screws, kept anyway, loved anyway, and I cross out my sunset.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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