Starting Off: Writing on a Rainy Day

Mar 05, 2025

I’ve dreamed of writing a blog for as long as I’ve been editing books. That’s about 7 years now, I discovered today when I renewed my membership in the Editorial Freelancers’ Association (EFA).And today, a day of rain but mixed with sunlight between the showers, I’m actually starting it. And it’s kinda’ fun.

Procrastination is more than a boogeyman to me. My ADHD enables me to practice it regularly – except with my writer clients to whom I strive to respond rapidly; I know they are experiencing high anxiety from the minute they send a draft to me and begin waiting for the response.

But my own work is different. I can find plenty of excuses to put off getting that done. I’ve been doing that for weeks now. The writers in my goal-setting group, The Write Place, will stare dumbfounded at this, no doubt, since they’ve heard me promising to get this first issue out for months now — maybe a year. But who’s counting?

When I asked them for suggestions – “What would you like to see in an editor’s blog?” – they generously responded. The first one that I grabbed was “What are your pet peeves in writers, and what are the issues you come across most often in editing?”

I had planned to feature a response to that in my first issue, but as I was setting up my account, Substack’s Set Up feature posted a suggestion of its own: that first-time blogs tell the story of their founding or, barring that, of their founders. So here I am proving that I can take advice.

That will come as good news to all the writers who are reading this and who are my potential clients. It bodes well for your experience of working with me. My ability to take advice, that is.

Speaking of which, I’ll take this occasion to enumerate my services and imagine my favorite client.

My services have tended to spread across the range of editing, from developmental editing to line editing to copy editing.

Truth is, I start working on a manuscript with the promise that I will do a developmental edit complete with an editorial letter that points out the best aspects of the work and any dead spots or general ways to develop the writing such as voice, clarity about the narrator, use of flashbacks, patches where the story moves too slow — or too fast, and how well scenes are developed mixed with advice to Show don’t Tell.

Problem is, I’m a generalist at heart. I see a sentence that doesn’t work, I fix it. I see a lapse into the passive voice, I write a righteous note in the margin. I see a dangling participle phrase or a comma splice, I can’t help myself; I stop and tell the writer to fix it.

So I end up doing it all. And my writers seem to think that I do it pretty well. At least they tell me so. I rejoice in that, since the main goal I share with each writer is to come up with a good, interesting, clear, well-written book, one that grabs the reader’s curiosity right from the beginning and pulls her inexorably on through from chapter to chapter, a book that readers can’t put down. And that they will tell their friends to buy too.

My favorite client – I thought I would approach that by thinking of a few of my favorite clients and creating an amalgamation of them. But now that I’m faced with the task, I can’t do it. Each one is sui generis.

The few common traits that I can think of on the fly include writing good, sometimes unusual, stories, often struggling to write regularly (and writing despite the struggle), being open to suggestion – that’s a kind of beginner’s mind thing – entering into a trusting relationship with me as we go along, and sticking to their writing until the draft is done – and then digging right into the next draft when they get my edits and editorial letter.

I often think of the greats in our field, and one such pair, editor and writer, was the editor Maxwell Perkins and the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald in the 1920s. I seem to recall that Scott took some ten years to finish his first draft of The Great Gatsby.

But finish he did, and the result is still astonishing; one hundred years later our public library still has a waiting list for it. I went back and reread it just last week, and I was still astonished at the way Fitzgerald could write a conversation and create a scene using intense, unexpected sentences.

Ten years, eh? I don’t advise it, but that’s how it happened. And I’ll work with that kind of a writer too.

Next up I’ll turn to the first topic that my group-mates in Write Place suggested, starting with one pet peeve and a commonly encountered problem.

Then in turn I’ll tell you why you might want to ignore that problem and just write, especially on your first draft.