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A Lamb to the Slaughter
by Erika Hoffman
I reminisce about my first writer’s conference and the
contained excitement I felt sitting down to have the first
chapter of my manuscript critiqued by an authentic editor.
She pulled my sheets off her tipping, lopsided, toppling
stack. In her fingers was my opus.
A massacre had taken place on the first page. It was
dripping blood red ink. She stared hard at my nametag and
then at the byline. With a half smile, smug and pitying
simultaneously, she asked “Air-REEK-ah?”
“Erika,” I replied.
“Eric-ka?”
“E-R-I-K-A,” I spelled.
When she mispronounced it a third time, I grinned
obsequiously and nodded.
“Today I’ve read some heart-breaking, gorgeous prose,”
she began. I sat up straighter. “Words that made me cry.”
She pulled her upper lip down the way a lady might do if
getting it waxed. “And, I have to tell those writers,” she
continued, as she glimpsed the forlorn pile, “that they most
likely don’t have a prayer of being published.” At this
point, I thought she might break down and weep. She grabbed
her forehead with her hand. “The market is just that tough!”
She narrowed her eyes at me the way I imagine a rattlesnake
does before it strikes. “Impossible to break into these days!”
I stroked my chin and nodded in agreement. Then, she tapped
her editor pen. Hard taps. “What I’m trying to tell you,
Air-reeek-ah, is that REALLY good writers can’t get published
in today’s market, so yours…well, yours,” and she glanced at
my submission as if it were a decomposing mouse, “yours is
not well written.”
A PHD in body language couldn’t have read me. I was a stony
gargoyle. “So you’re saying my writing doesn’t have a prayer?”
I asked. She looked past me at the clock. “Not without an
awful lot of work.” She shook her head dolefully. I started
to inquire whether there was anything salvageable, but she
reminded me my fifteen minutes were up. The next lamb to the
throat- slashing was in the queue. As I rose, she offhandedly
pushed her business card at me, which stated that she was a
word guru who edited manuscripts for a living.
I stumbled into the hotel’s lobby, like Saint Sebastian after
being shot by a hundred arrows. I mumbled to my megalomaniac
self that this hired hand didn’t know a thing about what works
and what doesn’t. Later I saw her chain smoking in the open
atrium which jelled my impression of her as a jaded editor
in a stereotypic drama. I stuffed my mangled monster in my
Barnes & Noble sack, and that night I ate anything I felt
like eating.
Back home, I studied her crimson suggestions of my first page.
I changed some things she’d hemorrhaged over. I continued to
work on my novel. A year later, the plotted thing, much tilled
and hoed, was accepted for publication by a small traditional
press.
Is there a moral in this “passion play?” You betcha. Listen
to your critics! A chestnut of wisdom hides among the barbs.
Pluck out the rose and avoid the thorns! Mend what needs
mending according to the red ink savages, but never let Doubting
Thomases overcome your will. Truthfully, I can’t recall this
woman’s name six years later. All I can resurrect is that deep
furrow between her eyebrows as she pursed her lips, coughed,
and crushed my hopes.
To make the encounter kinder and gentler and less devastating
for the hapless novice writer who’s baring her soul and her
talent (or lack thereof) I wish the evaluator might first
poison herself! BOTOX that decimating crease between those
judging eyes!
BIO
Erika Hoffman’s non-fiction stories have been appearing in
anthologies, such as Chicken Soup for the Soul, and others
since 2007. At this point, she’s had published over 90 pieces
and one novel: Secrets, Lies, and Grace under the pen name,
Riki Vogel. Her second novel, Runaway Faith will be released
by Comfort Publishing in 2012.
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