My Editor Kept Abandoning My Book—Because It Drove Them to Get Back to Their Own Writing
Author Ela Thier explains why her editor kept abandoning her book, because it drove them to get back to their own projects.
My editor had a confession: They had a hard time staying focused on my book, because they kept wanting to put it down and get to work on their own writing. I was so struck by this comment that I asked my editor, Andie Carver, to get on a Zoom with me and say more. Strap on a seatbelt for this part because Andie didn’t go through a gentle transformation. It was more of a volcanic eruption. Since editing my book, they:
- Redesigned their website and started a monthly blog—something they had been avoiding for a long time.
- Became a regular contributor to Reedsy Discovery, reviewing advanced reader copies every month.
- Wrote essays. Film analysis. A 6,000-word piece on The Substance.
- Finished a narrative nonfiction piece that they had been working on since 2022. They also began submitting to literary magazines.
- Completed a series of poems and began submitting those too.
- Revived a piece that they had been working on, on and off, since 2010.
- Wrote and performed a narrative nonfiction piece for a live audience.
- Outlined their memoir with a completely new angle.
- Then outlined another book.
- And started drafting both.
“What the hell happened to you?” I had to ask. I knew what had happened, because the book had the same effect on me.
Since accidentally writing this book on a whim, I wrote three feature scripts, then produced and directed one of them starring Oscar-winning actor J.K. Simmons. My husband, a bass player, read the first draft and then booked his first music gig in 20 years.
So what happened to dear Andie who was stuck having to edit my book while they were dying to put it away already and get back to work?
Must have been my super effective productivity system. Yes, I’m joking. Andie wasn’t handed productivity tools; they were ushered back into the sandbox where we all belong. It’s that place that felt like home when we were children, back when we knew how to enjoy making mud pies without a single thought about whether it was going to make money, or how it would be received by the critics—or by anyone, for that matter. We made mud pies because we liked the feel of wet goo on our hands, and creativity was the air that we breathed.
Andie told me that besides the relentless invitation to follow the fun, the book helped them recognize the voices in their head. That noise says stuff like “who do you think you are,” or “no one is going to read this,” or my personal favorite: “This has already been done.”
Imagine a kid not making mud pies because someone already made mud pies.
Instead of trying to silence those voices, Andie let them speak and then—wrote anyway. This didn’t make the voices go away. They wrote despite the voices.
At one point, while writing an essay, Andie got stuck halfway through without a clear thesis or an idea of where it was going. Instead of closing the laptop Andie ran a “fun check”—
“Am I having fun writing it?” They were. Case closed. That was all the reason they needed to keep writing until they brought it to the finish line, and let the thesis reveal itself as they continued to work.
When I wrote How To Fail As An Artist, kind of by accident, I was writhing in a years-long writing block and feeling sorry for myself. After reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, I felt inspired to write my version of it, which evolved into a pep talk for artists, disguised as a memoir about my decades of work as an artist. I randomly wrote the first chapter and was utterly surprised to be met with the feeling that I could probably write a second chapter!
This frivolous exercise in writing for the hell of it woke up Mr. Stop, the sock puppet that lives in my head (and probably in yours too, and certainly in Andie’s head!). It went on to berate me about how bad a book it was throughout the entire duration of my writing it. I chose not only to give it airtime any time it popped up, but to include what it had to say to me in the book itself. The book is full of these inner monologues that describe the experience of writing a book. Fifty-five chapters later, I completed the manuscript despite all the noises in my head telling me to stop.
How did I get to the end of that book? I did like Andie. I decided that even if it’s a bad book, or a good book that no one will read because (according to Mr. Stop), I’m a textbook example of a nobody—I would keep writing it for one reason, and one reason only: I was having fun.
Writing this book was like making a mud pie. Hope you make yours too.
Check out Ela Thier's How to Fail as an Artist, My Best Tips here:
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