Editors have superpowers, but you can’t save everybody.
One of Ayn Rand’s most useful distinctions for writers is between abstractions and the concretes that realize them. She’s obviously not the only person to employ such a distinction, but if you think of abstractions as representations of a set of concretes, it helps you realize that you cannot portray pure abstractions like justice or injustice: you need to show the abstraction in concrete actions to communicate it. For example, the theme of your story may be “the mind on strike” but it must be realized using a set of concrete characters and events that (hopefully) illustrate that theme.
Once you’ve decided on an abstract theme, it can help you ruthlessly cull unnecessary concretes from your story, or to flesh the theme out to fit the concretes that you do have, or both. The same is true for editing anthologies, only with a little less flexibility as we don’t completely control the submitted stories. For example, the Neurodiversiverse’s theme is “neurodivergent folks encountering aliens”, and if we get a story that does not feature neurodivergent folks, aliens, or encounters, we are not in the position of a writer who can tweak the themes or their realization until they both fit: we have to just reject off-topic stories.
But, as my coeditor and I like to say, editors have superpowers. There’s more than one story in the anthology where we’ve been able to suggest edits – based on the theory of conflict, or the major dramatic question (“who wants what, why can’t they get it, what do they do about it, and how does it turn out”), or even just line edits – that would resolve the problems in the story to the point that we’d go from a reject to an accept – or would resolve them, if the author goes along with the changes, that is.
But sometimes we can’t even do that. There have been several stories where we applied our editing superpowers and drafted a way to fix the story to fit our theme – but where we, reluctantly, declined to pass on the story anyway, because we were no longer convinced that the edited story would be what the author intended. If a story was way off the anthology’s theme, but the story’s theme was really integral to the story’s implementation, then changing the text to fit the anthology may not have suited the story.
In the end, despite our editorial superpowers, we can’t “save” all stories, because not all stories NEED saving: some of them may not be right for this particular project … and that’s OK.
-the Centaur
Pictured: A nice heritage indoor mall in Asheville, which is a great writing town.
