Losing My Editing Cherry

College. Senior year. First and last writing class. I was a virgin as a writer, having been doing it only a little more than a year, and just in private. Never showed my work to anyone. A classmate who would go on to be a screenwriter and film director convinced me to try a writing class with him. I was scared and yet confident everyone would finally find out just how good I was and how bright my future would be. I was an undiscovered young Hemingway. Or probably more of an F. Scott Fitzgerald kid. I had immersed myself in all things Fitzgerald for my junior year, and was drunk on words, long, flowing rhythmic sentences and fat paragraphs.

Our teacher was a Harvard man who wrote and published poetry, lived in New York’s West Village and rode his motorcycle into New Jersey to teach at Rutgers University. He had the most eloquent way of speaking, and of course that Haa-vard accent, full of pregnant meaning.  He spoke in a dry, flat way, showing no emotion. I guess he thought his words would stir up passion on their own, and usually they did. Fred Seidel was a literary insider with the clubby Partisan Review, then the premier New York magazine for elite writers. All in all, a very intimidating guy for a 21-year-old wannabe who grew up blue collar in a four-room apartment and was a high school jock.

Weather permitting, we would hold the class outdoors on the grass of Rutgers’ 18^th Century Queen’s College campus, with its ancient, ivy colored stone buildings. Each of us had to write something, a story, poem, whatever you fancied. First you would submit your work to Mr. Seidel and later meet privately with him. After that you read for the class to comment on.

I do not remember what my short story was about, except that it had lush sentences exploding with metaphor. I thought it was brilliant. When the time came for my sit-down with our poet emeritus, I was expecting a coronation. I walked into his office brimming with confidence, full of myself. I would leave an hour later a very different young man, and would learn a lesson that stayed with me the rest of my writing life.

Mr. Seidel’s trademark was brilliantly insightful and brutally honest summations of students work. I remember one class in particular in which this poor guy read his absolutely dreadful poetry for us. At the end of his reading, everybody was silent. Nobody knew what to say that wouldn’t drive the poet to tears. Mr. Seidel spoke for us. He started by saying the poems would be perfect for Hallmark greeting cards. The young poet actually smiled, thinking that as a compliment.  Then Mr. S. dropped his bomb: “Your work reads like a compendium of dead metaphor.” The poet left the class crushed, and undoubtedly ended up as an insurance salesman or accountant.

My moment came, my private audience with the Literary God. For one brutally ugly hour Mr. Seidel took my story virtually line by line, word by word, and blistered the bloated and flamboyant images in my words. He shredded the writing. I mean, totally, unequivocally shredded it!  I felt like my heart had been cut out with a steak knife, my brain seared with pain. At the end he gave me my one and only compliment on the piece, sort of. He said: “Somewhere in here there’s a good story lurking, but you haven’t written it.”

I will remember until the day I die the words I said to myself as I walked out of that classroom carrying the pages of my story, which looked like a road map of red lines, most of them cross outs and stinging commentary in the margins. My eyes were wet, the tears flowing down my cheeks. But at the same time I was angry, absolutely furiously angry. Not at Mr. Seidel but me! And I said to myself: “NOBODY…will EVER do that to me again!!!”

From that day on I edited and shredded my own stories over and over until they were ready to be read. I became a better writer for my bitter and humiliating experience. Even today, many years later, whenever I think I have finished something I ask myself, “What would Mr. Seidel say about this?” I would know in an instant exactly what his critique would be, and so I dove back in and continued editing…and editing...

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” – The Great Gatsby