Craft Talk: Writing for Magazines and Newspapers that Edit

A few things to know/expect.

Hello, subscribers! It has been a minute—my job has been extra busy—and so I’ll be making up with some extra posts over the coming two weeks. I spent last week rushing to write a guest Op Ed essay for the New York Times’ Sunday Review about the awful things happening in higher education. It was originally due March 24. Then a lot of news happened. So I had to turn it around in a few days while on a long-planned vacation with the kids at a water park.

This experience brought to the top of my mind the many challenges of writing while having other responsibilities. I’d write a bit on the chaise longue at the pool, then take the kids on a terrifying water slide, then squint at my laptop from a shady table, take calls from my editor with Taylor Swift blasting in the background, then, the tenth time the kids begged for lemonade, go get lemonade and play “Zeus on the Loose” (we recommend!) then do a little more writing—and then finally stayed up til 3 a.m. to write. It could have been worse. But it wasn’t ideal.

I like this mantra. Photo by hannah grace on Unsplash

I also recently had a conversation with Merve Emre at Wesleyan, in her Shapiro Center series “The Art of Editing,” about what good editing is and does (audio and transcript here).

Taken together, the experiences brought to the top of my mind some thoughts about process when writing argument-driven essays. I’ve written and edited such pieces for years, often on a quick turnaround, back when I was at Slate; now, at The Yale Review, I help top edit such pieces. And they are often tricky to do, and take a lot of work from both writer and editor.

Below, six things to consider or expect when you’re writing for publications that have a robust editing practice.