When I first started, you know, you had this thing you don’t want anybody to mess with what you’ve done. You want to write it and you want to send it off and you want them to print it as is. And, you know, when you’re, when you’re in school and you write it and you’re teacher gives it back to you and it’s got red marks on it, that means you might have gotten a bad grade. You know.
It’s like a C-, I was, I was like the kind of guy that got a lot of B-, C- on stuff. And you get it back from the teacher and they didn’t like it and you’re like, oh. Well, what I’ve discovered in the, in the real world outside of school is when you get it back and it’s covered in red stuff, that’s actually, it doesn’t mean you failed, it means you still have a long way to go, but the editor is there to help you get an ‘A’ eventually.
And the editors not going to stop until it’s an ‘A’. So you’ve got to get back to work and if you see it as an opportunity, if you see it as not just fighting the editor but actually trying to see what the editor is doing, because the editor wouldn’t have made that red mark if it was right. Or sometimes the editor wouldn’t have made the red mark if they understood what you were saying.
So the editor isn’t always saying you’re wrong, sometimes the editor is just saying, I’m going to give you another chance to be clear with what you were doing. And I can honestly tell you that my books — if I had a chance now to let kids read Origami Yoda before I had been through the editing process, I’d be embarrassed. I’d be embarrassed for them to see it, because my editor helped make that book what it is.
And she made it a better book, she made it more clear what I was trying to say, she helped me get my point across. And she helped me understand what I was, what I was trying to say, helped me make it clear and help me make it better. Yeah. No one is ever going to see those original manuscripts. Those are buried now, because my editor, she made it so much better that that’s what I’m happy to people — that’s what I’m happy for kids to see.
And it’s a team effort. The editor and me, we’re a team and it’s hard to have that relationship with your teacher. It’s hard to see that you’re teacher is doing the same thing. But that is what your teacher is trying to do. Your teacher is trying to team up with you and help you get to the ‘A’. And when I was in school it was hard for me to see that and I would be mad at the teacher. And it takes a long time, it took many years to realize we’re all on the same team, we’re trying to get to the same place.
