As you may know, I’m a writer. Not a great writer, but a competent writer who works hard on getting just the right phrase or just the right word. And I have had five books published.
As you may know, I am also copy chief at a monthly magazine. My job is to follow the editors and writers around with a pail and shovel, sweeping up after their grammar and punctuation. I am not allowed to “write.”
I’ve been here six years, and my “stop pretending to give a fuck” skills are wearing thin. Last night I encountered a headline that was so lame it made the saints weep (Baby Jesus was not heard from). I went to one of the editors and said, “May I please rewrite this headline?” and she said, “Yeah, sure, if you can think of something better.” So I e’d her SIX alternate headlines. None of them Mrs. Parker-worthy, but all a damn sight better and more original than what was there.
This morning I get it back. Same old headline. No notes. No “thanks, anyway.” Nuthin’. Just “take your green pencil and get back to copy editing, little girl.” Well, excuse me for having high standards for our magazine and respect for our readers’ intelligence!
Feel better Eve, we all know how it sucks to be looked over at work, especially a job you don’t you aren’t crazy about in the first place. I’m thinking for a New Year’s resolution, I may finally get the balls to quit my current job and make an effort/gamble to get something that is worth my time. In the mean time, fuck them. You’re better than they are, you’re better than the job, and I’m extremely jealous/impressed that you’ve had five books published.
Well, Eve, as someone who’s trying to break into the writing business, I have to say that at the very least your story makes ME feel better. If high-falootin’ muckety-mucks like you with five published books and job in the industry get ignored by editors, it makes me feel all the better to be ignored by editors.
Where do editors come from, anyway? Do they spring fully formed from the pits of hell? I’ve never before encountered an industry where even the lowest of the low on the payscale seem to build a monument to refusing to acknowledge anything that crosses their desks.
There are no jobs for women over 40 in this business, unless you’re Tina Brown or Anna Wintour . . . come to think of it, Tina Brown’s out of work, too. I’m hanging onto this job (and its medical & dental benefits) for dear life while I get my master’s.
And no, I would be incapable of asking the editor why she rejected my suggestions w/o dripping so much venomous sarcasm that the carpet would burst into flames beneath us.
Your innocence is showing. When people make hiring, firing and promotion decisions, it’s not like they have to give their REAL reasons. For example, I think medical insurance costs are a major consideration for employers nowadays. Two employees of equal worth, but one is older and more likely to use health insurance and drive rates up. Who do you THINK gets promoted, fired, etc.?
Eve, babe, I am so fucking there with you. I, too, labor in magazine purgatory and suffer daily at the hands of the clueless, the capricous, and the crappy. I don’t want to go into too much detail, but I’m an editor and writer at a women’s magazine (I’m a guy, for all those who think I’m a girl because they think the “vibro” in my name refers to vibrators instead of a minor villan on my favorite episode of Space Ghost Coast to Coast) I passed up an opportunity to become managing editor a while back because a) I didn’t think I would be very good at the job b) the extra money wasn’t worth the extra hassle and c) despite the fact that I write a ton of copy every month about shit I could care less about, writing is still better than not writing. I’m kind of regretting my choice now becuase every issue brings a new indigity. Recently, in leiu of a new captial-E Editor, we’ve taken on board a “creative director” who apparently thinks this is an ad agency and is throwing her weight around trying to get a very skilled and easy-to-work-with graphic artist let go. And I actually had a salesperson–in direct violation of long-standing policy–sell space in one of my columns! I ended up on the phone with the president of a company that had bought an ad and been promised editorial space without anyone informing me about it! When I protested to the highers up, I got no support and was forced to include it in my column.
I just try to go along to get along. I need the money and the benefits. As I have told another one of my co-workers “Just take their money and let them fuck up. Fighting won’t do any good, and ultimately no one, including our readers, will care.” But it’s just been getting tougher and tougher recently. My first movie as a writer/director just won the big local film festival, which is super-great, but that also means that I have had to go from big-time conquering hero back to peon, which doesn’t help my day to day mood. Plus, in the last week, I’ve been sick with bronchitis which removes my two primary methods of fighting off depression: working out and consuming the demon weed. And I just found out I have to work on Saturday. Again.
Fuck. Black, black mood today…
Sorry for the bitching. This really isn’t like me. It’s all Eve’s fault.
Your woes, especially in regard to the headline, remind me of the SNL sketch involving a quiz show where the contestants were required to give the answers most commonly given by American high school students. Jean Kirpatrick was one of the contestants and a high-school teacher was the other. It was pretty funny.
At the risk of sounding like Seymore Skinner, have you ever though of embracing the challenge to come up with stuff, not that is good or correct, but that will out do the editor? You know, make a game of it! Then you wouldn’t have to be sarcastic because now your goal is to out do the editor at her game. When she takes your idea over hers, you’ve scored a win. Then see how many wins you can get in a week and in the following weeks, try to beat that number.
My bad, sorry. In the SNL sketch analogy, I though you were giving “Lansing” as Michigan’s capital (the correct answer) instead of something like “Michigan City” for the state’s capital (the answer given by the common high-school student), and the editor wants the “Michigan City” answer, which made me think that you could have fun making up goofy-assed shit that the editor will like.
But I don’t know headlines. She wants headlines that are just lame. That’s no fun.
Well, till recently, one of my functions here was to make wisecracks on the galleys (never on the computer, only written on the print-outs!) to amuse coworkers. But one of the humor-free, recently hired editors told me, “Please. This is not helpful.”
Eve, I feel your pain. As a fellow writer, nothing hurts more than seeing someone publish shoddy writing. Another thing that makes me batshit is when I write something for a magazine or a business with nice, concise writing that I spent hours editing, crafting language as powerful as possible with zero grammatical and spelling errors, only to get my contributor’s copy back with additional, unnecessary words, glaring grammar errors, and completely worked headlines and tags that are ended in five exclamation points or printed in font that is so huge, you can hardly read the word for the size (this is especially prevalent when you write and edit copy for the web).
Good luck hanging in there until you get your masters!
Oooh, I’ve been at places where people like that have been hired, and they’re an office-wide buzzkill. People with no sense of humor should have jobs that don’t require personal interaction.
Eve, as someone who’s also feeling underappreciated in their current post, I say start getting some resumes out if you can. That’s what I’m doing.
. . . or when the art department starts playing Vincent van fucking Gogh at the last minute for no reason except they can, and you have to completely re-edit it, because they have screwed up all the word breaks, and re-typed the pull quotes with every goddam word spelled wrong.
“Oh. I think this dek would look better in orange, with a sans-serif typeface. It has to ship in five minutes? Never mind, the production people can stay late!”
