How Can An Editor Balance Editing the Work of Others with His/Her Own Writing?

            We have been asked to go back in time, in my case about 3 decades, to my early 20s, and write about what kind of job in the publishing industry I would most like to hold, and to discuss how that job would balance with my own writing activities.

            For me, the answer then would be the same answer I would give today. As much as I love writing, I also have a passion for editing. By the age of 21, I had served as editor of my high school newspaper, which won awards for its quality, and I was the founder and editor of my college newspaper. Because of my credentials as editor of the St. Joseph’s College Spectrum newspaper, before I graduated, the college saw fit to establish a Written Communications minor, which shared faculty between the English and Communications departments.

            To me, writing is great, but it is only one piece of the puzzle. Valerie Peterson (2017) wrote, “The book publisher’s editors perform all the duties necessary to acquire and edit books and see them through to publication, including dealing with literary agents, authors, and interfacing with the breadth of the book publishers other staff.” As the editor of my school publications, I had become accustomed to having my fingers in every facet of the publication process, and that definitely appealed to me, so having interactions with so many stakeholders as Peterson notes an editor might have would have been my dream job then, and still appeals to me now.

            When I look back on my 20s as they actually unfolded, I spent most of that decade writing things other people (notably newspaper editors) wanted me to write, and as a result, every creative idea in my brain took a long vacation. I wrote thousands of stories appearing in multiple daily newspapers around New England, but the creative juices that had me writing fiction from the age of 11 until I was in college abandoned me. It was not until several years after I left the newspaper business that I had my first inspiration for a piece of fiction. About 15 years had passed!

            Because of this drought, I can only speak hypothetically about how I would have balanced my writing. I suppose you could say that in my real life, writing to satisfy others became more important to me that nurturing my creative side. I hated it. I wondered if my creative juices would ever return, and ironically, it took a personal catastrophe to open the flood gates to my creativity. That, ironically enough, occurred 15 years ago, and the creative juices are still flowing freely.

            The way I would ensure that my writing would not take a decade-long back seat to the day job would be to allocate certain hours of the day exclusively for writing. I did not have children or even a relationship to compete with that in my early 20s, and I had an employer in college who had drilled into my head the need to have an organized structure to my day, planning out which tasks I would perform at which time. That system worked for me in his department – the Student Life Office – so I have no reason to believe it would not work in my personal activities.