Tips from remarks by three speakers at the Writers Life 2009 program, co-sponsored by the National Writers Union and the Cambridge Center for Adult Education.

(notes by Barbara Beckwith)

Steve Maas (www.stevemaas.com), Globe editor until 2007, now a freelancer:

The Globe (newspaper and magazine) now relies more on correspondents, many of whom are laid off staff. Freelance opportunities include columns like "Perspectives." To contact editors, go to www.globe.com (scroll to bottom for contact info). Pitches should be under a page, have an angle/attitude and story hook (why NOW?), show the writer's writing style, and make clear that the writer has done research (if you pitch a story that depends on a source, talk to that source first). You want the editor to say: "I didn't know that!" Helps to have edge, conflict; narrative style (like fiction but true) also helps. (Harvard's Nieman journalism site) has examples.

Relations with editors: Remember that editors are swamped (adhere to "need it by Monday" deadlines but realize that your piece may sit for a month). Editors forget that freelancers are out there alone and some editors are rude. Be patient, diplomatic. If your emails go unanswered, don't take it personally and don't get disheartened. Realize that editors are stuck in their cubbyholes (never leave their desks for 25 years) and need you to bring them new ideas.

Some editors nurture, some hover, some let you alone. Some articles will go through many drafts: most writers want product to be as good as possible. Good editors listen, and good editors don't totally rewrite your work. On the other hand, writers can get upset at rewrites even when phrases you fall in love with get in way of what you're writing about. If you don't know something, don't write fuzzily around it - find out about it. Getting dates or names wrong will hurt your chances: editors talk with each other ("she had three errors in her last story").

Edith Pearlman, author of three short story collections and more than 250 works of short fiction and non-fiction:

I am rarely troubled by editors' changes − they tend to make the piece better. Two exceptions: I once used a double negative in a Globe op-ed: a misguided editor changed one negative into a positive, which made the sentence convey the opposite of what I'd intended. And Redbook once dumbed a piece down, substituting shallow adjectives for my careful metaphors."

To avoid being edited, Pearlman edits herself. She first writes "early drafts," after which she extracts a theme from "the swamp" of those drafts. She enlarges on that theme but then pares away everything that ISN'T the story ("I crammed in all the knowledge I'd proudly attained, then took most of it out: the bits that remained gave my prose a kind of authority." Next, she reads it aloud to herself ("It's amazing the infelicities that crawl out of spoken sentences") and retypes as many times as necessary -- always on a typewriter: ("Retyping forces you to read every sentence again and again, like an editor. There's no temptation to leave anything unexamined, because it has to be retyped anyway."). She brings it to her writing group who "point out flaws without mercy" and revises until that group "have nothing to do but fuss over a comma." Pearlman's final advice: "The more work we can do ourselves, or better, with the help of colleagues, the less likely we are to endure an editors tampering."

As an editor, she feels like a midwife to people's stories, books and articles. "I try to nurture, to cultivate the first draft, which can be a tender shoot. At New Age, I asked for two or three drafts, sometimes six, and sometimes even from even seasoned writers who have just dashed something off."

As a freelance "book doctor," her job is to find a structure for the work; it may not emerge in the lst, 2nd, or 3rd draft, but my job is not to impose. "I worked with an author on an auto-biographical novel about shark fishing: the book didn't pull together, until I saw that the drama of the hunt could be used as a frame."

Pollack described her experience as a writer working with an editor. She once wrote a 5000 word piece for Orion magazine that used material developed over 10 years. As a reporter, she'd always kept herself out of her articles, but Orion wanted her to put herself in. The editor "nudged me to dig more deeply into what might be personally painful, or what I might take for granted."