by Christopher Ketcham
It is a rule of thumb in the life of the freelance journalist, almost as sure as the law of gravity, that the more you get paid for an article, the greater likelihood it will turn to mush at the hands of too many people paid to “edit” the work. We might even work out a financial equation for this degenerative process: for every cent-increase in per-word payment, there will be a meaning-decrease in every word. Or, rather, the words will take on all sorts of meanings you never thought they had. Or the words will pop their heads into scenes where they had not been meant to pop. Or the editors will attach like ticks to the ideas of the people quoted and suck out entirely, perfectly, inanely, the meaning of what the person really said. Or the words will be a jive version of your original intent, the fevered imaginings of a slope-shouldered creature who sits in a room most of the day looking at a computer screen or mirror. Finally, in the worst case, the words may not be the words you wrote at all – a shock to see at the eve of publication, something weird and alien, as if your newborn child had grown an extra head in the night and now screamed at you in the morning.
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