Simple but huge editing task
In service to the reader
To just about everyone I’ve ever edited, I have said: nobody owes you their attention; you have to earn it and keep earning it with every word.
By that, I mean of course, that just because we wrote it doesn’t mean anyone has to give a damn about it, and in fact, a great swath of things written out in the world is miserably navel-gazey.
But, here’s where a thing often goes wrong: we hear a critique of a thing as being navel-gazing, self-important trash and we think there is no room for personal narrative in non-fiction. Which is not true. The guardrail is to polish the work with clear and urgent awareness that the reader owes us nothing and a million other things are likely competing for their attention, so our task, in addition to writing well, is to write in a way that is useful to the reader.
I encounter this often with the press releases and pitched I received every day: a person will pitch me so-and-so to talk about their company or their book or their research and the content of maybe half of the pitches are at least somewhat interesting, but the wide majority of them do nothing to tell me how that thing they’re pitching will serve my readers or listeners. Don’t tell me you want to get interviewed about your book, tell me why your book matters to my audience.
The same goes with our narratives. Don’t write only about what happened and how you felt about it in a personal narrative piece; write about why what happened matters— to the reader, to the world.
That is the antidote to so much of the navel-gazing; that is how to connect your narrative to your reader’s attention.
So you task today is to look over some personal narrative writing you have already written and see how you might polish it to be in service of the reader by being clear about not just what happened but why what happened matters.
