Editing Unveils Hidden Truths

Fuel from Mary Carns and Halftank Studio

Most people picture a book editor as someone who double checks your Oxford commas and tells you your writing is beautiful. The reality is closer to someone handing you back a puzzle and saying: I think some of these pieces belong to a different box. As a writer, I need the latter.

I started writing about workplace dysfunction as a series of Medium articles. That format has its own logic: you make one point, you land it, you're done. An article is a sprint. I wrote them relatively fast, with minimal editing, and I could see the finish line the whole time I was running. In addition, I was writing to an audience of mostly my peers: other people in the tech industry. I am guilty of taking advantage of jargon without defining its meaning, which is truly one of my pet peeves.

A memoir is not at all like writing an article. A memoir is more like building a house where you keep discovering the foundation was poured for a different floor plan. You have stories from fifteen years across a dozen companies and you have to figure out not just what happened, but why it matters, and in what order, and whether the version of yourself who lived through chapter three is recognizable to the version who shows up in chapter eleven. A Medium article never asks you that.

I reviewed some of those articles and I noticed a lot of potential jargon: MVPs, prototypes, wireframes. Terms that even some people in the tech industry don’t really understand. I realized that if I used those words that I had to be very intentional and define them for a more general audience. This is when I realized that writing a memoir would be much more than a copy/paste job. I had to put a lot of what happened in its proper context.

When the manuscript went through professional editing, what I got back wasn't a red-penned grammar lesson. It was structural — the kind of feedback that only becomes possible when someone reads the whole thing at once and can see what you've been too close to see yourself.

One thing that the editor caught that I overlooked was the role of my husband in the book. I didn’t even mention him until I was halfway through the book. I mentioned my experiences with my Invisaligns more than my interactions with my husband (???!!!???). I knew then that I had to add him as an important character, plus tell some back story from the beginning, such as when we got married quickly after my first layoff, since I thought, laughably, that it was a one-time setback.

What struck me about that feedback is that the editor wasn't wrong, and I knew it immediately. That's a particular kind of discomfort — not the discomfort of being unfairly criticized, but the discomfort of recognizing something you'd been avoiding. In design school, you learn that criticism isn't a personal attack, it's a data point. I've been saying that to design teams for twenty-plus years. Turns out it's harder to believe when it's your own memoir on the table.

Throughout my editing process, I was also journaling and digging deeper than I had in a long time, noting specific details that I hadn’t considered in years. I knew that I had to add even more of my and my husband’s back story to the beginning of the book: my pre-ACA worrying about how I was going to get health insurance, “planning” a quick wedding on a nonexistent budget, and yet still having hope that my situation was a one-time blip. I had not even considered how those details put a lot of what happens in the book in context.

The difference between a Medium article and a memoir, it turns out, isn't just length. It's accountability. An article can make a point and move on. A memoir has to earn its ending — and an editor is the person who tells you when you haven't yet.

The best feedback I've ever gotten — in work, in design, in writing — has always been the thing I already knew but wasn't ready to say out loud yet. For me, digging out of my comfort zone has made my work better. I mentioned my Invisaligns more than my husband. If that's not a metaphor for how we bury the people who actually matter when we're in survival mode, I don't know what is. What have you been leaving out of your own story?

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