18 January 2005
Fish wrap
One notion it's important to lose when writing for publication in the overwhelming majority of periodicals is the notion that art is in any way involved. This is a trade, and largely due to the journalism schools which squeeze the life out of any imagination by teaching dimwits that all article writing must proceed by a set of rules, even most features are limp on the page. They've met an early death by being too tightly caged.
It's occasionally possible to get in the odd flash of wit, but many editors have remarkably small vocabularies, and literary references pass them by. That's good, of course, if they represent the readership's level of understanding, but not otherwise. But rewriting by editors often goes well beyond simply dumbing down or forcing a story into an ill-suited structure. Editors who have been nowhere near the destination described will sometimes even largely rewrite a story to represent what they want it to be, even if that has nothing to do with the truth. (My worst experience of that was with Time, although I once asked for my name to be taken off a piece in Winds.
So the writer has to get used to seeing his by-line next to drivel which has little left of his own making, and indeed one of the single most important skills anyone writing for a living needs to acquire is the ability to concentrate on the mantra,'Today's paper is tomorrow's fish wrap'.
But the edit of the already substantially rewritten and cut Lost in Translation piece was a complete dog's breakfast: there were new sentences in limp, vapid prose; several additions contained internal repetition or repeated material elsewhere in the piece; paragraphs were moved around so that meaning was garbled and ideas were introduced whose explanations appeared later in the story. It was completely amateurish, and I was being asked only for a fact check and an instant response.
So instead I rewrote much of the piece to restore order and sense, swearing as I went, removed all the redundancy and repetition, and corrected some introduced errors.
To my surprise almost all of the rewrite was accepted, and I went to bed happier, if not entirely happy since a few leaden phrases still existed, quite a few good things gone, and the whole story pointlessly restructured for no obvious profit.
Say after me: "Fish wrap. Fish wrap. Fish wrap."
Now taken into account that the word rate is pocket money, that the story was expensive to research (it was in Japan, for a start), that the work was done in October and it's now January, and that for its pittance this publication demands world rights for all media in perpetuity, something which should cost at least three times as much per word. Worse, this inexperienced editor doesn't know and is too dimwitted to turn a blind eye to later sales in other markets which might just make doing such a story financially viable. I'll be paid in about six weeks.
I spent much of today on rewrites to another Japan story which came back, but the requests were clear and sensible, and the main problem was one of how to engineer the addition of the extra cultural and historical material wanted while still leaving some brief description of the trip itself. Travel pieces are getting shorter and shorter, which is one reason why they are also getting more and more trivial. Before long it will all be 500 words, and mostly lists: the Ten Best Places to go Dwarf Tossing.
Such are the pleasures of travel writing.
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