When the Hamster Made Love to a Pig | Travel. Write. Live.
Two months later, the article was published and very little was changed. It was nice to see me name in print. However, my Pulitzer line now read, “The agouti looks like a cross between a hamster and a pig.” Seeing my first story was great but I couldn’t get the sting out of having my once brilliant line morphed into something so un-romantic. Romance would have used an image of a pig making love to a hamster. Well, at least it was in the mind of my fragile ego. The worst thing happened. I took the edit personally.
Since that time, I have written a ton of other articles for the same editor (glad I never complained). I have also become an editor. Sometimes, I have deleted, rearranged, changed, altered and edited other writers’ brilliant lines. I never intend to upset a writer.
However, I occasionally have a writer who wants to know how I could change their best lines. As a writer, I identify. As an editor, I am never emotionally attached to a great line or aside. The whole story, and every word in it, is always a work in progress and fair game to be changed to improve the whole. It is never personal. I have learned that writers do their best to offer something interesting, funny, unique, insightful, and/or informative, but editors have to think about the larger picture of style, tone, readership, sensibility and sometimes keyword optimization. Difficult decisions need to be made. I have learned that getting edited is the rule. I have also learned that the image of a pig making love to a hamster, no matter how loving, may not be for everyone.
As an English teacher, I’m used to suggesting things and making corrections on students’ work, but I really just started getting into editing with my internship at Matador Abroad. I’ve realized it can be tough to find the line between editing and making sure I leave the author’s voice in there. There are so many things to think about – the publication style, grammatical aspects, fact checking.
Just last month I submitted an article mentioning people being “decapitated” by kite strings in Pakistan. The editor asked me to check on this, as he could only find evidence of “throats being sliced open” and nobody really having their head lobbed off. I eventually rewrote and changed the line to reflect this, but “watch out for your throat being sliced open by a kite” just didn’t have the same feel as “don’t get decapitated by a kite string.” I totally agreed with the editor though and I’m glad he called me out on it; it was more important to make sure what I was writing was 100% true than that it sounded cool.
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