If you’re reading this, it’s only because it has passed through the net of editorial scrutiny. Presumably, an editor or editors have sharpened the argument, eliminated irrelevancies, tightened the prose, and reined in my more intemperate claims. It wouldn’t be the first time that an editor’s blue pencil has delivered to the reader a cleaner, clearer version of what I had intended to say in the first place.

Do I really believe that? Not entirely. I'm a writer; of course I think I know better than my editors. The good ones have proved me wrong. The not-so-good ones have turned my copy into what neither they nor I nor any reader could conceivably want: mush, or at best, smooth, facile, professional, and forgettable prose. Although complaining about bad editing might seem the worst sort of authorial petulance, it’s ultimately the reader who loses more than the writer. The writer merely suffers another blow to her or his dignity; welcome to the trade. The reader is deprived of what might have been an authentically readerly experience. The encounter with a unique authorial voice – perhaps idiosyncratic, maybe even a bit digressive – is sacrificed for the no-risk familiarity of the house style.

In a recent reminiscence in Literary Hub about the magisterial editor Lewis Lapham, Elias Altman wrote, “The best writers love being edited; it’s the bad ones who resist.” I'm a bad writer; I hate being edited. Except when I don’t. There have been occasions when editors have saved me from myself. Some years ago I submitted to my first editor and publisher, Roger Lathbury of Orchises Press, a second memoir that I thought might capitalize on the very modest success of my first memoir. To my surprise, he rejected it outright. His reasons for doing so, though expressed politely, boiled down to this: it was no damned good. Classically, it took a practiced and disinterested editorial eye to see what I couldn’t. Editors are supposed to bring out the best in their authors. Roger Lathbury did better than that. He saved me from a lifetime of shame by declining to publish an unsalvageable book.

Lathbury always claimed that it was the author’s book, not his. He would make a few (invariably judicious) suggestions but studiously avoided tampering with the author’s voice, even at the expense of a few infelicities here and there. His goal was to bring distinctive literary voices to the world, not to bend writers to the dictates of an imagined and illusory standard of literary excellence as enshrined by, say, The New Yorker. There are, of course, other, more assertive styles of editing, The New Yorker itself being famous for its exhaustively interventionist editorial practices. I haven’t missed an issue of The New Yorker in forty years, but I do sometimes think that, for all the sheen of its elegant prose, it could do with a little less editing.

I once had an editor who was so assertive that he simply tossed out the article I had been selected to write on Joseph Conrad for a literary reference work and substituted his own. Given that the editor was one of the world’s leading authorities on Conrad, I couldn’t have agreed more. Wrangling would have been pointless. He saved us both a lot of time and trouble and, being a full-time staffer, I got paid anyway.

In that same Literary Hub piece, Elias Altman wrote, “Substance is a must, but if the prose doesn’t sing, where’s the pleasure in reading it?” Is he kidding? In a heavily edited piece, the music of the prose is the first thing to go. And that is what most breaks my heart – that in some of my most egregiously edited essays, it doesn’t even sound like me. Other writers have made or can make similar arguments about the literary and cultural topics I tend to write about, but maybe not with the same wit or at least sense of playfulness. I'm not in a hurry to clinch my argument. I trust that for the reader no less than for myself, it’s the journey that matters as much as the destination. If I wanted to call a spade a spade, I would. But I don’t. The grace notes, the literary allusions, the half-serious asides – these things, with certain editors and certain publications, will not survive into published form. The reader will never know what I know: I write better than that.

It's entirely possible that the excellent essays, reviews, and short stories I read in my favorite journals owe their excellence, at least in part, to the intercession of various unsung editors. I’ll never know. What I do know is that I'm far from being the only writer frustrated by what we perceive as lethal misrepresentation by trigger-happy editors. Unlike me, some of those writers have largely bailed on the publishing industry and taken their work to Substack. Yes, I know. Any crank can create a self-infatuated Substack, and plenty do, but I’ve  found my way to a handful of Substacks as enlightening as the journals I regularly read. Occasionally, when I'm reading Sam Kahn or Ted Gioia or Roxane Gay or any number of exemplary Substackers, I’ll think, Yeah, this is a little slack, I can see where an editor would tighten it up. I can live with a superfluous clause or two. What I get in exchange for some slight verbosity is the unmediated voice of a writer I very much want to hear. We live in a mediated world. The best editing is responsible, sensitive, creative mediation. But it’s still mediation.

In a 1991 interview in The Paris Review, Harold Bloom was asked about the role played by editors in his published work. He replied, “No one edits. I edit. I refuse to be edited.” Given the number of rather tendentious and repetitious books that Bloom turned out in his later years, one might wish he hadn’t had the clout to refuse editing. But he also gave us Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. It’s a voluble, outlandish, unedited glory that even the best editor in the world could only have diminished.

For every Harold Bloom, there’s a Jack Kerouac. Kerouac’s problem, as his editor Malcolm Cowley told him, was that he “didn’t know how to write.” So Cowley took the unshapen mass of On the Road and turned it into the readable, fluent, and authentically jejune book that it is. But even if you like Jack Kerouac more than I do, you’ll have a hard time arguing that On the Road didn’t need editing. That book (it’s really not a novel) may or may not be an achieved work of literature, but it’s certainly a necessary and inescapable one. It speaks to a certain experience of being young. A world without On the Road would be a poorer one, at least when you’re nineteen or twenty. If it hadn’t been for a fussy, middle-aged editor, generations of excitable undergraduates might have missed out on the innumerable and essential bull sessions about Literature and Experience that On the Road surely inspired. And it’s still Kerouac’s book – just, you know, better.

I like to think I do know how to write. So did Jack Kerouac. Don’t trust the author. Some years ago, I published regularly in a now defunct journal called Open Letters Monthly. Each essay or review was collectively vetted by a team of Contributing Editors who interspersed their comments in boldface type next to every perceived solecism or logical fallacy in the submitted draft. They didn’t hem and haw. “This is trite.” “You’ve already said this.” “Cliché.” “Pretentious diction.” “Drop the jargon.” “You’re losing the thread again.” At first, I was shocked by the bluntness of the language, but I came to understand that the editors had a journal to put out and no one had time for politesse. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. (“Cliché.” “Maybe you should omit the whole paragraph.”)  In the end, I rather enjoyed these curbs to my vanity. I qualified. If I hadn’t qualified, I might have been fobbed off with some polite words of encouragement.

Although I too was, nominally, a Contributing Editor at Open Letters Monthly, I couldn’t bring myself to do any real editing. I tried to chip in once or twice, but I found myself questioning perfectly serviceable word choices or, worse, editing for the sake of editing. Following Roger Lathbury’s maxim about the text belonging to the author was harder than it seemed. Why couldn’t some of the contributors write more like, well, me? A few of the drafts I read were not at all up my street, but I also realized that my quibbling wasn’t going to improve them. Better for them to get out into the world in as near as possible to the form the authors had intended and let readers make of them what they would. At least I knew when to quit. Not every editor does.

To forestall damaging editorial interference, I’ve been tempted to plant a deliberately redundant paragraph or two, the hope being that I might deflect the editor’s attention from what I most want to preserve. More than likely, this outflanking manoeuvre would only backfire, which is why I haven’t yet tried it. Also, it’s insane. Still, after seeing a couple of my most prized essays turned into something I'm almost ashamed to claim as my own, I incline to suspicion. Of course, I could simply say no – no, these “few light edits” fundamentally misrepresent the text, make me sound judgmental or supercilious or humorless, and I withdraw the submission. But writing is a hustle. If I take such a high-minded stance, will I ever publish in that journal again? Will there be anyone left to whom I can whore myself out? There’s also the matter of timing. With some publications, the back and forth – reasoned, collegial, even intimate – goes on until the next-to-last edit. Sometimes the last edit, which I don’t see, is shockingly different from the next to last edit, and the happy day of publication turns out to be a public mortification. Wait a minute – I didn’t write that, I wrote this! Too late now. Given that the publications I write for are generally highbrow, this slight dumbing down, this perceptible movement towards the literal and the explicit, would seem to sell readers short. If they’re reading publication X in the first place, they can handle some nuance and indirection – unless, of course, I’m making a hash of the argument, which is always possible. My ideal editor catches me at points where I might have gone astray, without urging me to any dulling literal-mindedness. It’s the real ones who sometimes give me trouble.

The day of publication has also revealed, on occasion, some remarkable changes to my title, namely, that it’s gone. I will be forever grateful to the student assistant at one journal who transformed my cumbersome and pedantic “The Schadenfreude of Criticism” to the marvelously pithy “Let Me Ruin This for You.” She should have got a byline. More often, it’s the other way around, and the titles that I’ve devised to intrigue and orient the reader succumb to an editorial mania for explicitness. Although I'm more than capable of coming up with some clunkers, the equivalent of a newspaper headline in a literary journal is likely to be the handiwork of a nervous and insecure editor.

 In a way, my relative marginality as a freelancer works to my advantage. I have little to no chance of getting published in The New York Times or The New Yorker. Would I want to? Yes. However, the higher up the chain you go (as a rule), the heavier the editing. I know not to waste time with the big guns, and anyway The New York Times would make short work of my very unTimesian preference for indirection and implication. I'm about halfway up the chain, where, despite all the preceding complaints, I usually work with reasonable editors who may kill a treasured sentence or two but also make suggestions that even I – not the most objective reader of my own work – can hardly fault. Usually. But the other times take the piss out of me and, more importantly, disserve the reader, who may love, loathe, or be utterly indifferent to my writing in its (mostly) original form but will never know what that was.

One of the middle-of-the-chain journals to which I’ve been tempted to submit makes a point of scaring off potential contributors with these fearsome submission guidelines: “We’re known for our exacting, intensive editing process. If you write for us, you can expect to write 3-5 drafts of your essay, which will also be professionally factchecked and copyedited.” On the surface, this editorial rigor would seem wholly commendable. What reader doesn’t want a thoroughly trustworthy, logically consistent argument for position X, Y, or Z? And I can’t say that the essays I’ve read in that journal are stylistically bland or intellectually predictable. Possibly, it's the best edited journal in America. But I’ll never submit there. It’s useless to point out that I’ve written many more than five drafts of any essay I’ve ever submitted and that I go to great lengths to give factcheckers and copyeditors nothing to do. I make mistakes. I have blind spots. Something tells me, nevertheless, to stay away from this erudite, micro-edited journal. I want to make the best possible argument that I can. I also want to be the author of anything that appears under my name. Three to five “exacting, intensive” edits by someone else, and it’s not my writing anymore. It’s theirs.