Dealing With Editors: Draft Before You Discuss
While it’s always a good idea to talk to editors about your plans for a piece, it’s very important to make sure you don’t lead them to form the wrong expectations. After all, doing that is only bound to end as a huge frustration for both of you.
Here’s how that usually goes:
- You come up with a brilliant idea for a piece. It percolates in your mind, brewing like a tasty pot of soup until it all seems clear.
- You call up your editor about the idea, impressively detailing what you thought up hours ago.
- Since it’s all brilliantly laid out in your head, the pitch is marvelous. The editor is enthused.
Doing good, right? Ummm…not really. Most of the time, it ends up with you submitting the piece and the editor being disappointed – the story didn’t end up the same as the one you originally laid out. What went wrong?
Before writing something, things can always change. That cool idea that your editor approved may not seem too feasible after doing your research and gathering your sources. So, instead of giving the editor the exact thing you discussed, you provide an altered version that was actually a better fit given the information you gathered. The result is frustration, and no topnotch writing software can save you.
It’s for that reason that we highly recommend having either a crude outline or a rough draft before you even make the pitch. That way, you’ve already done some amount of research, allowing you to properly gauge exactly what kinds of things you can do with the piece. Even better, you can have your editor read through what you’ve written before you begin expanding it with an explanation.