Quality Control

Sometimes watching an OEDILF workshop is like watching a customer go up to a Persian carpet-maker and complain that there’s a flaw in a pattern three-quarters of the way along the edge. The maker responds that the flaw is intentional, to show that only God can make something perfect. I don’t believe in all that, says the customer, so could you restitch that section for me? No, says the maker, it’s integral to the design. Well I don’t like imperfections, says the customer, so your carpet isn’t good enough; I’m not buying it.

Now and again I see editors have these conversations with authors and then refuse to RFA at the end of them. I’m not talking about conversations about flaws that everyone agrees need addressing: unambiguous areas of punctuation, say, or misleading definitions, or dodgy rhythm and metre. I mean the ones that ultimately come down to a subjective assessment of artistic purpose and value: people asking themselves not only whether a carpet has the right dimensions and weave, and covers the ground adequately, but whether it’s beautiful by their standards.

We’re all entitled to our own aesthetic response to particular carpets and particular limericks. But if we use that as our main basis for bestowing RFAs, we risk shortchanging all sorts of work with purposes and goals outside our personal frame of reference. Worse, we might feel compelled to badger the author to change something that we don’t like, ignoring that they might have other artistic aims in mind. We end up like that customer trying to get the intentional flaw repaired.

We should also keep in mind that we’ve become hypersensitized to writerly tricks by reading so many limericks. When anyone employs unusual effects nowadays, even if sparingly and consciously, they seem to get called out for it. Homophones, straying from transitional anapest metre, the occasional extra unstressed syllable, and enjambment even when it doesn’t force the metre: the list is growing. My concern is that we’ll end up with a bunch of limericks as exciting as listening to a metronome.

 

Almost everything I workshop ends up with my RFA or STC. That doesn’t mean I RFA it immediately: I RFA as soon as I’m satisfied that spelling and punctuation, rhyme, rhythm and metre, definition, and OEDILF formatting are adequate. If I see a way that the artistry of the limerick could be improved (in my opinion), I’ll suggest it; but if the author disagrees I won’t withhold an RFA on that basis. I don’t see it as my job to be the arbiter of their artistic vision.

I know some think we should have quality as our main criterion for RFAs, but as a collaborative effort involving large numbers of people we would do ourselves a disservice by bringing that into each and every workshop. If this were a small-scale enterprise with one editor, authors could expect to have to meet that editor’s personal standards of quality. But we have dozens of editors, and it would be impossible for us all to agree on one core set of quality standards: impossible, and deeply undesirable, because as soon as we compromised on one we would lose all the authors and editors who felt that they didn’t fit it in some important respect, and we wouldn’t be able to know who we would lose in advance.

Quality emerges naturally across the board as we all learn from each other what we can do with the form. Our work has been getting better as we’ve shown each other what’s possible. We don’t have to hold some pure artistic editorial line on each and every limerick: in the long run, the vast numbers involved mean that quality will out.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t make artistic suggestions; that’s fine. But sometimes I see editors making such suggestions, authors responding that they prefer the artistic effect of what they have, and the editor in question refusing to RFA because the author hasn’t bowed to their artistic vision; and that worries me. If line 5 has a typo, by all means withhold your RFA; if the piece defines cat as “dog”, withhold your RFA; if the metre just isn’t working, again, keep working with them to see if it can be fixed. But to withhold your RFA just because they didn’t write what you would have written is effectively saying... well, what? That your way is the only right way? Who can honestly believe that, given the enormous variety of limerick-writing styles we see around us?

If you make your suggestion and the author explicitly rejects it, what is achieved by repeating the suggestion or withholding an RFA because it wasn’t adopted? If the author doesn’t agree with your artistic assessment of their work, why should you get to be the judge of what’s “as good as it can be”? Pushing beyond what the author is happy with, by badgering them to make changes with the promise of an RFA, contravenes the spirit of the author having final say, and that spirit is what built everything we’ve got.

Think about why you’re withholding an RFA. If it’s over a difference of opinion about what would be funnier or more artful or “better quality” in some subjective sense, then you are that carpet buyer insisting that a flawed edge be restitched.

The workshoppers’ prerogative not to have their RFA attached to a particular piece can be taken too far. The most precious commodity at the OEDILF is eyeballs—having someone look at your work in the first place. If that pair of eyeballs withholds an RFA over a difference of taste, the author is punished by having their work linger in limbo for weeks or months longer than it would have, and other editors are punished by having to spend time on a piece they otherwise wouldn’t have in order to get it to the finishing line. I’m conscious of this as an Associate Editor; if I don’t STC a particular piece, I know that one of around half a dozen other specific individuals will have to. If I get too precious about what my STC is attached to, one of them pays for it.

We all owe everyone for their RFAs on our own work. Treating our own RFAs like precious gifts that can’t be sullied with “inferior” work, when an author has said that the work is the best they can make it and exactly as they want it, is effectively saying that meeting your personal artistic preferences is essential for final approval at the OEDILF. And I’m saying it isn’t, or shouldn’t be. RFA means “I think this is ready for final approval at the OEDILF”, not “this meets my personal standards of artistic perfection”.

(Obviously, it’s okay to repeat a suggestion if you think the author hasn’t noticed it in the crowd. I’m talking here about suggestions an author has explicitly rejected.)

 

If you feel a particular style of writing or humour is underrepresented in the OEDILF, you could try to convince everybody else to write more limericks based on that style (good luck with that), or you could lead by example by showing us its possibilities. What you can’t do is issue a Picard-like “make it so!” and expect everyone to fall into line. Some might. Others might tell you to get bent. Or, more likely, leave quietly by the back door.

The flavour of the OEDILF has been shaped by thousands of words, thousands of individual decisions about what to write about those words, and thousands of individual comments in workshops indicating whether or not those specific artistic decisions have been successful in those specific cases. For any kind of blanket request for “fewer puns, please” to translate into a noticeable difference in the OEDILF’s composition, we would have to have editors saying things like, “I notice your punchline is a pun—we’ve decided we’d like less of those,” which is guaranteed to drive people away. Not those who have been around long enough to know how to stand their ground, but the newer OEDILFers who might stay for the long haul as long as they feel they can fit in.

I’ve seen authors driven away because the early workshopping they received was from editors who weren’t on their wavelength; and yet their contributions would have been on others’ wavelength if only those others had been around to say so. It’s too easy to be unintentionally discouraging at the best of times.

 

At times it’s been suggested that we workshop each others’ work as if our own names were on every piece. I’ve never done that, and think it would be unreasonable to do so. Why would I want to read a hundred clones of me? More to the point, how would I defend my own voice—and my own accent, an issue that comes up again and again—against voices from a different background with a different accent?

There have been cases where I’ve made a suggestion that an author has liked so much that they offered me co-authorship, and I’ve had to say, “Okay, but only on the condition that we also change this, this, and this”—because my original suggestion was trying not to override their voice, but if my name is on a piece then I do want it to reflect my voice as much as theirs.

I’ve seen RFAs withheld because a piece doesn’t work in a particular WE’s accent, or because it’s not quite their sense of humour, or some similar matter of taste. Sometimes there’s a solution that can keep everyone happy, but often there isn’t. What good does it do anyone to “demand perfection” in such cases, when perfection is so often subjective? What good does it do to go slow, when the author’s version is one perfectly valid approach? Sure, we’re writing for the Ages—that doesn’t mean it has to take ages. And the Ages will have plenty to quibble about with our limericks, even the ones that we all agree are 100% perfect.

Reworked from forum comments from December 2006–January 2007.