This is an excerpt from my e-book Editors Unleashed: Magazine Editors Growl About Their Writer Pet Peeves. I spoke with 10 assigning editors at national and trade magazines (under condition of anonymity) to find out what writers do that piss them off — and how to avoid being an editor’s nightmare.
Interested in reading the rest? The e-book is only $6.95 — check it out and order it on the e-book page.
The Editor: Assigning editor at a national, large-circulation general interest magazine.
The Peeve: Writers who change the story mid-assignment.
What’s your biggest grammar/style peeve and why?
I don’t think I should have to tell a writer twice not to double-space after periods. I told a writer once, and the first time he did it I went through the copy and removed all the extra spaces; it took me a while, but it was fine. I sent him a note saying to put only one space after periods, but the next time and the time after that he did it again. Why? I don’t want to spend 10 minutes going through a story taking out the double spaces. It’s about attention to detail. I don’t know why some writers feel like they’re in an ethereal existence where it’s all about the art. It’s about the other things too.
Can you share a writer horror story?
A lot of writers we have the most problems with have the best credentials—they’re the ones who drop the national magazine names. They say, “I’ve been in Vanity Fair, Time, Newsweek, blah, blah, blah.” But they have some of the worst habits. I had one that had basically every national sports magazine title to drop, and awards that sounded incredibly impressive. The fundamental story we assigned was a profile of the fitness and nutrition regimen of an older top-name athlete. We discussed the idea thoroughly, and this athlete was not easy to get. The writer turned in what was a passable sort of mini-profile of the athlete. There were only one or two paragraphs in the whole 1,000 words that dealt with his fitness and nutritional regimen. I know a lot of assigning editors tend to do this passive-aggressive thing, but not me—I just said, “I hope you have 700 more words worth of content in your notebook on the topic we assigned.” That wasn’t the case, and it just didn’t work out.
What can a writer do to assure you’ll never hire him again?
The main thing that stops a writer from being used a second time is that the writer just didn’t get it.
We always say to read the magazine; this gives you a certain sense of the style, tone, substance, and presentation. But to really get the DNA of a magazine, you really have to write for it and go through the editorial process. I don’t expect a writer to turn in something that completely matches the tone, style, and so on exactly as we discussed the first, second, or even the third time. Still, there are some writers who just don’t get the fundamentals of the assignment. They have an idea in their head and say, “This is what the real story is about.” But we’re the gatekeepers here.
It’s okay to argue your point in the initial assignment conversation; I don’t take it personally. You can fight for your angle, but at the end of the conversation, we’re going to have an understanding, and I’ll even send an e-mail to summarize. When the story is turned in, it needs to be at least 70 percent there. I can’t look at it and say, “This is so not resembling what we disc
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