You will continually be taking chances. There will be readers who want you to kill that ape with the oboe, get the diamonds out of the roast beef, cut ‘myrmecoid’ and ‘sharded.’ (“Don’t say ‘myrmecoid,’ say what it means: ‘antlike.’” I’m not interested in dictionary-definitions, I’m interested in connotations. ‘Myrmecoid industry on the lawn’ conveys something different from ‘antlike industry.’ “Yeah, it does: ‘Myrmecoid’ conveys nothing at all because no one knows what the word means.” Some people know, and those people will feel that ‘antlike’ emphasizes ‘industrious’ and buglike, while ‘myrmecoid’ stresses forever small, anonymous, all but meaningless. “There aren’t any such people.” There are. “Aren’t.” Are. “And meantime you’ll be losing real readers.” Won’t. “Will.”) …

I talk of the ideal intended audience as though it were a perfectly homogeneous thing, laughing and sobbing in unison, restively shifting simultaneously in its seats. But there aren’t two people on this globe whose sensibility-prints are totally identical in every crease and whorl.

So the writer should live with the fact that though he may have a congregation that, on balance, likes his book, he won’t please any two members in exactly the same way. …

Sometimes a writer’s stand is solely on sensibility. If I’m wrong about my audience’s general—not universal—acceptance of the ape-with-the-oboe image, then I tell you I’m in damn bad trouble. Because I’m convinced it’s okay. The best kind of editorial remark is the one that strums a chord already humming suspiciously in the writer’s mind. There are other things in the script I wasn’t totally convinced about (like ‘myrmecoid’), and if enough kibitzers on the manuscript had told me I had to get them out of there, I’d have probably said, yeah, yeah, I knew it, okay, out. Probably.

The writer has to be prepared that someone out there will hate his whole book—diction, tropes, everything. He can believe that doesn’t prove much. And each new thing he tries will find someone who rejects it.

But here’s the peculiar thing. Most lay readers do not appreciate the variety of reader response. They tend to take their response as the response. The editor, if he’s good and apt for the book in hand, does, enough of the time, react in a way that is the response. But still he’s sensible enough to realize that even he, paragon that he is, may be idiosyncratic on a given point. The private reader, the non-editor, is usually absolutist.

“This is told in the present tense! I hate the present tense in novels. It’s awful!” From “I” to “it’s.”

Thus the writer should not begin to wonder about his editor and wonder why he didn’t notice such-and such, just because someone corners him at a cocktail party and says, “I love your book. Everything about it. Except such-and-such. That was awful.”

—Thomas McCormack

Transcribed by me from pages 138–140 of my paperback Paul Dry Books edition of The Fiction Editor, The Novel, and the Novelist (second edition, revised), © 1988, 2006.

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