No Path Ahead for Writers

With an extended rainy season, no one has to worry about watering the plants around here just yet.

It's been raining again today, off and on. Everything is growing just fine without any additional attention from us.

In conversations with a few other writers lately, they complained about editors who never have a nice word for their work, but often are bluntly critical. The writers described how, bit by bit, they feel themselves shutting down.

One friend likened it starving a plant. "You water it less and less until it dies. That's how writers die."

Another friend notes that writers survive more or less like camels in a desert sometimes until a "great editor finds them. Then everyone wants to suck them dry."

This kind of cynicism is common among writers, all the more so in a time when we are so badly underpaid that the minimum wage would be a giant step up.

A society that kills off its writers is much like a land that kills off its plants. Once the nutrition is gone, the inhabitants will starve.

***

When I worked as an editor, I loved working with writers and designers, and I know that most of them loved working with me back. It is a collaborative art -- content creation -- and there are many ways to tell a good story.

But writers, like all artists, need to be nourished, to be brought along.

Too bad that kind of editing appears to be largely forgotten, and most definitely under-valued.

Those employed as "editors" in today's publishing industry should answer this question. Do you find yourself complaining about writers more than praising them?

If so, perhaps you are in the wrong job. (Emphasis added but not meant.)

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