Tell Me Lies

or me, a great relationship with an editor works like this: about the book I’m working on, she tells me the brutal, take-no-prisoners truth, but about me, she lies as if her job depended on it. And that is her job, as far as I’m concerned. After the million and one things she spends her day doing, this is what really matters to me . . . the precisely titrated, perfectly timed dosage of truth and lies, administered equally convincingly, that is required for me to produce a book. “The whole piece is a mess” must be coupled with “but don’t worry — you could re-write this in your sleep! You can make it fabulous!”

It’s the second part of the equation — the skillful lying — that’s so important, of course, because we writers are a quivering lot, with egos that need constant bandaging and splinting, even as our paragraphs need constant slicing and knocking apart. At least that’s me. And I’ve been very lucky to have had editors who get it completely. The time I appreciated this most had nothing to do with writing a book, though.

What happened was this: an editor I was working with several years ago, probably desperate to get me back to writing after the angst and drama of the divorce I’d just gone through, encouraged me to try my hand at a dating site. This is a confidence-challenging endeavor for anyone, let alone a hypersensitive artist-type, but she was the perfect editor throughout the whole thing. First, she guided me through the profile-writing: “This whole piece is a mess! But don’t worry — you could re-write it in your sleep! You can make it fabulous!” Then she took time out of her life (not work time! never work time!) to pore over the crop of potential matches with me, parsing their profile texts to ferret out hidden character flaws, deleting scores of men with her heartless red pencil. Finally we found someone I liked and whose profile she couldn’t find fault with. (Well, he was a writer — probably he had his editor working with him on it, too.) And then she even, God bless her, went on a double date with this man and me.

He was handsome. Just blindingly handsome. Sadly, however, he hadn’t a single other trait that would make him a good match for me, and several in fact that made him a terrible choice. No matter . . . he was so handsome.

It didn’t last. I wasn’t heartbroken, but the aforementioned ego sustained some major damage. My friends gathered to support me by reminding me of his negatives, all the reasons I shouldn’t want anything to do with him. These things were the truth, yet they didn’t help one bit. Woe was me. But when I called my editor to tell her my sad news, she knew instantly that what was needed was a lie, and a big one.

“Well, Sara, I never thought he was good-looking enough for you” was all she said.

This made me laugh so hard, and appreciate how lucky I was to have an editor who knew exactly how to handle me, that I dragged myself out of bed (where I’d been nursing my crushed spirits with writerly amounts of red wine and dark chocolates), got back to the keyboard, and wrote a book.

I still appreciate it . . . she knows who she is.

Sara Pennypacker’s latest book for children is the third in the Clementine series — Clementine’s Letter (Hyperion). Her first book for adults, My Enemy’s Cradle (Harcourt), was released in January under the name Sara Young.