guest blog: sarah rainone: the difference between editors and writers
When I was studying journalism at Syracuse University, one of my professors revealed the biggest difference between editors and writers: “You can always tell who the editors are because they dress well and look put-together. The writers, on the other hand…†He was only half-joking.
I looked down at my outfit.
Jeans, blouse, sweater, and boots all purchased from the one “hip†store on campus that sold Diesel and Mavi, so… editor.
Only I’d slept in these clothes, so… writer.
Only I’d slept in these clothes because I had been up until 4 am proofreading the school newspaper (I was its editor-in-chief), driving the proofs to the printer, then picking them up a few hours later and delivering them around campus in my Oldsmobile Cutlass Sierra.
So… editor.
(Or… papergirl?)
I knew back then that despite the fact that I enjoyed shopping and bathing, I wanted to be a writer. I also knew that the idea of interviewing people for the rest of my life made me literally sick to my stomach. Despite the fact that I’d only been doing it for two years, I was burnt out on writing – as a result of churning out four or five pieces a week between classes and the newspaper, I was smoking more than a pack a day, sleeping less than five hours a night, drinking every day, and “relaxing†on the weekends with various psychadelics and stimulants. It was an exciting time but the stress from writing about real people and real issues was too much for me to handle at that point in my life when I knew too little and felt too much. If this was the writer’s life, give me the nice clothes and the “cushy†editor’s gig.
And so three weeks after graduating I began a job as the assistant to the editorial director of Doubleday’s business imprint, who also edited science, current affairs, and history. I wasn’t thrilled about the prospect of working on business books – my best pieces as an undergrad were about the anti-globalization and pro-labor movements on campuses around the country. I’d even spent a night in jail while covering a protest at a World Bank/IMF meeting in DC. The police had told the media that we were free to go while they arrested everyone else but I could hardly do that with the protestors begging the media to stay: “The whole world is watching! This is illegal!†(It turned out, by the way, that the whole world wasn’t watching. But my parents were.)
Since I liked the other nonfiction on this editor’s list, and he seemed terrific (luckily, it turned out, he is), I took the job despite my anti-business sentiments. And so the question of whether I was a writer or an editor remained. While working in publishing, I tried to write a couple of non-fiction pieces but every time I embarked upon a piece, I got the same anxious feeling I still get when I smell marijuana: both journalism and pot remind me of the most unhealthy part of my life, when everything was a deadline and nothing was under my control and I could always be scooped and I’d never be able to capture life as it really is and who was I to write about your life when I just met you 20 minutes ago?
The more anxious the idea of writing made me, the more I threw myself into my publishing job. Over the years, when I was not editing books on competitive advantage or globalization, I read manuscripts for the fiction editors at Doubleday, often reading 400 pages in one night just for the fun of discovering a new voice. Over time, I started to see how I could make these manuscripts better as well as ways to market the books using the techniques I’d learned in all those business books I’d been editing. So one day I asked the editor in chief, who’d always been very supportive and encouraging of me, if I could edit the occasional novel. The answer was a flat-out no.
I was a great reader, he told me, a terrific non-fiction editor, and he knew I would make a good fiction editor, too. The problem was, there were simply too many fiction editors at the house already and if I were to start taking on my own fiction projects, I’d be stepping on toes. Why not hunt out more books by polymaths, behavioral economists and the like, and find a niche for myself that every other editor in town wasn’t trying to fill? It was good advice – maybe even too good since, flash-forward a few years later, every editor is trying to fill that exact niche, only now the category is grossly over-published and everyone just wants to read books about teenage vampires. As he told me all this, I tried holding back the tears (rule number one in at least 17 business books: NEVER CRY AT WORK), but I didn’t do a very good job of it, because the fact was, I knew I could branch out into editing more polymaths. I was already doing a bit of that, I just didn’t want that to be ALL I did. At that moment, I made a decision. If I couldn’t edit fiction at the house I’d come to love and wasn’t ready to leave, I’d do them one better and write my own damn novel.
And so I did.
I’d been writing fiction in my spare time for years, but nothing spurred me on to actually finish something more than the knowledge that I had no real control over the kinds of books I edited. Thankfully, writing fiction brought no such limitations and no queasiness, either. I could suddenly tell the world what I thought about it, even when I thought two completely opposite things at once, which was often. I could test-drive opinions I didn’t actually believe, try on personalities I didn’t actually possess. I could be at once anonymous and influential, mysterious and visible, controversial and blameless, liar and truth-teller.
And, remarkably, now that the novel I wrote is about to be published and I no longer work full-time as an editor, I can still dress well.
SARAH RAINONE is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn, New York. She grew up in Cranston, Rhode Island, and attended Syracuse University. Read an except from Sarah’s debut novel, Love Will Tear Us Apart. Click here to pre-order the book (do it now! peer pressure!)
