In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.
It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. 
-Joan Didion

While Tim Burton’s interpretation of Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega) in, what else, Wednesday can be more than occasionally too mawkish for comfort, there is one thing he and writer Lauren Otero get right about her in the fourth episode of season two (which rounded out “Part One”), “If These Woes Could Talk.” And that is, in the universe where Wednesday is an aspiring writer (or, as far as she’s concerned, the greatest writer of her generation), she is vehemently opposed to the theoretically collaborative process between writer and editor. And yet, watching her read the rejection letter (yes, a tangible one, not just an email) from her erstwhile publisher—brought to her from the mailbox by her stalker/acolyte, Agnes DeMille (Evie Templeton)—it’s easy to see even the “cheeriest,” most “cooperative” of writers present in her reaction. One that finds her skimming through the highlights as she reads them aloud: “‘You’re incredibly difficult to work with,’ blah-blah-blah, ‘adamant refusal to engage in the editing and rewriting process,’ dah-ta-dah-ta-dah, ‘regrettably I must drop you as a writer. Please seek help.”

As an editor, of course, I’ve had that last thought myself about writers and their arbitrary sensitivities more than a few times (granted, there are writers who see editors as being the ones with arbitrary sensitivities, with my most notorious ones being contempt for Oxford commas and repetition of the word “said”). As a writer, though, I understand. We all think, to some extent, that our work is “hallowed,” “God’s gift to humankind,” etc. Why would anyone ever want to change it, let alone be foolish enough to reject it? And who made them qualified to decide anyway?

To this question, I would be a liar if I didn’t admit that starting a literary magazine had a lot to do with thinking everyone else’s was shit (and, in truth, that’s why most people start a lit mag, deny it as they might—well that, and a combination of vanity and delusion). Filled with safe (and usually nepotistic) choices that rarely made for riveting reading. But all it takes is for the Literary Establishment to brand something as worthy, and most everyone else is brainwashed immediately into thinking it’s good (see: essentially any published work in The New Yorker). No matter how over-edited, as it were. Stripped of its original voice and tone entirely.

So, yes, no wonder Wednesday’s reply to Agnes saying she’s sorry her manuscript has now been rejected is this: “Why? I’d rather no one read my novel than make a compromise.” And who amongst us simultaneously insecure and egregiously arrogant writers can’t relate to that declaration? Who amongst us hasn’t adhered to it by giving up completely on any so-called major publishing houses and finding an alternative means to get the work out there? All while still largely adhering to what Wednesday said about no one reading the book anyway, save for those few close friends and family members that were willing to buy a copy on Amazon (which will distribute literally anyone’s book). What do we, as writers, gain out of it—this assertion that it’s better not to change a single punctuation mark than have it published in an altered form by an editor? Well, “integrity,” we tell ourselves. In addition to how important it is not to compromise, not to risk having a reader think you actually intended a sentence to sound like that when, naturally, it’s no one’s “fault” but the editor’s that it does.

Funnily enough, I’ve been told I have a pretty “light hand” overall with editing. And I don’t want to have to heavily edit someone’s work, save for the “objective” aspects of it: spelling, grammar and adherence to the magazine’s editorial style. Yet even when I’m at my most minimal, I’ve still experienced some major Wednesday-level blowback (and don’t get me started on poets). Writers who simply can’t “take it” when an editor actually does what they’re supposed to: edit. Because there is no possible world in which some mistake isn’t made in the first version of the submitted document. Yet there are a good number of writers who refuse to believe their work should be subjected to the “treacheries” of editing. Begging the question, why submit at all? That is, if your ego can’t “endure” hearing things that it doesn’t agree with. That it refuses to process. Or, as Lucille Bluth (Jessica Walter) on Arrested Development once put it, “If that’s a veiled criticism about me, I won’t hear it and I won’t respond to it.” Ah, but a writer will respond to it when there’s an editor involved, lashing out in ways that would make even Wednesday blanch.

By the same token, an editor can be viewed as “too rigid” in their decision-making. Thought to be “the enemy” by those writers, like Wednesday, who can’t compute being edited, told that there’s still room for improvement. So yes, there’s a form of bitchery on both sides. Try as the more Enid Sinclair (Emma Myers) types might to chirpily remind that it’s meant to be a collaborative—not combative—process between editor and writer. Yet, when one is dealing with a writer who has the same level of arrogance as Wednesday (indeed, that word—arrogant—is lobbed at her several times in season two), it’s difficult to not feel the same as the editor who wrote back to her, “Regrettably I must drop you as a writer. Please seek help.”

Because, in all honesty, most editors are getting far less out of the “collaborative process” than the writer. First and foremost because it should already be considered a gift to know that anyone is actually reading a writer’s work in its entirety in this day and age, when no one has the attention span or willingness to spend their time on such endeavors as reading an unpublished manuscript. Of course, the writer swears that it’s they who are getting the fuzzy end of the lollipop in this “deal”—especially when literary magazines (de facto, the editors that run them) are such “pirate” operations. “Stealing” writers’ submission money to line their already robust pockets—ha!

Though, in the twee world of Wednesday, where publishers still send out hard copies of rejection letters, she likely didn’t have to pay a submission fee. But even Burton and Otero couldn’t bring themselves to mitigate the reality that publishing a writer who refuses to budge even a single iota when it comes to their “prose” is completely anathema to the editor, who (for the most part) isn’t trying to edit for the sake of their ego, but for the sake of yours (a.k.a. by improving and polishing your work). In short, the editor’s masochism was made for the writer’s sadism.