One thing I’ve recently given up in favor of other things is getting a blog post out on Mondays. It’s Wednesday, so this is two days behind, and my last was also a day or two behind. That’s relatively minor as far as sacrifices go. It’s on my mind because it follows up the theme and the issue that I was writing about in my previous blog posts, which were both interested in the necessary sacrifices that accompany the process of working with other people. And it’s still part of my personal situation, as well: in my last, I was writing about how a query letter led to the need to write a proposal. This week, I get to celebrate the fact that the proposal also received a positive response.
Once again, however, the positive response was also tied to more work and more need to satisfy the concerns of the editor. The acceptance requires my willingness to work with the desires of the editor/publisher—they are not, after all, going to publish my book because they want to do me a service. If they decide to publish my book, they’ll do so because they think they can make a profit by publishing it. If they stop thinking they can make a profit, they’re going to stop thinking about producing my book.
One way to respond to this tension pulling on my work is to insist that it remain unchanged and that they accept it as it is. Sometimes work is so good that it warrants such an attitude, and sometimes the specific changes requested are obviously stupid. But often, the requests made by others are useful, even beneficial.
Personally, I don’t view my book as such a masterpiece of English that it couldn’t be improved. Throughout the process, I made choices that seemed like good ideas at the time, given my sense of what the book could be, but were not central to what I wanted to discuss. One such choice was whether to aim the book at a smaller or larger audience—I went for the larger, but the publisher wants the smaller. Now that I’m speaking with a specific publisher, some of those choices don’t suit the publisher, because their vision of what the book could be differs from mine. To me, as long as their vision doesn’t clash with what is central, I have no complaint about making the change, even if it is something that I am sacrificing.
One of the things about working with other people, and making compromises when their desires do not perfectly match your own, is that often the other people are right. In addition to my own book proposal, I’ve been working with a client who is trying to get his book through the steps of publication, and the most recent request from his publisher was to revise the opening pages. The book is awesome and a week or two ago, they were pushing the author to change the title. At the time, I supported him in insisting on the title he had chosen. This time, however, the publisher is right in asking for revision of the opening pages: they could be better.
To some extent such judgments of better/worse are personal: my view of those pages will not match those of all potential readers. But often there can be some consensus. I’m thinking right now of the “director’s cut” of many movies: often the director’s cut means adding scenes that had been left on the cutting room floor. And, personally, I think that such revised (extended) versions can often make the work worse as a whole, even when the added scenes are themselves good. The movie Apocalypse Now was re-released as Apocalypse Now Redux with almost 50 minutes of original scenes that had been cut from the original release, and while each scene is good in its way, the added running time takes a long movie and turns it into a test of endurance.
Working with other people—publishers, for example—means respecting their desires. It doesn’t mean surrendering all boundaries, but if you’re never willing to make a sacrifice when your opinion differs from that of a collaborator, that doesn’t show much respect for their desires. Compromise and sacrifice are an integral part of cooperation, and if you want to be part of a larger community, then cooperation is necessary. If you can keep focused on the success of the cooperative endeavor, then it’s easier to celebrate the compromises that you have to make.
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