Lead

Two weeks ago I was made a lead writer. I've been waiting to write about it until I understood what it meant, and I've given up on that, because I suspect it will take a year.

Here's what I know so far. I write fewer words of my own. I read a great many more of other people's. A month ago my day was a document with a cursor blinking in it. Now it's six documents, none of them mine, and a calendar that looks like a game of Tetris someone is losing. I spend my mornings reading drafts and my afternoons in rooms explaining why a character who says one thing in act one can't say the opposite in act three unless something happens to her in between.

I thought I'd mind. I do, a little. There's a particular pleasure in finding exactly the right line for a character at four in the afternoon, and I get it less often now. But there's another pleasure I didn't know about, which is reading a draft by someone two years out of school and finding the line they couldn't see was the best thing on the page. You point at it. You say, more of this. And the next draft is better than anything you'd have written yourself, because it's theirs.

My mother was a librarian for thirty-some years, and for a lot of them she taught children to write book reports. She used a red pencil for mistakes and a green one for the good parts, and she said the green one mattered more and wore down faster. I didn't understand that until this month. I've bought a green pen. I'm using it a lot.

What I'm still learning is when to stay quiet. A writer on the team will bring me a scene with a problem in it, and I can see the problem from the doorway, and every part of me wants to fix it. The job is to ask the question that lets them see it themselves. I am not good at this yet. Priya, who is better at it than anyone, timed me in a meeting last week: forty seconds before I rewrote somebody's line out loud. She says the target is never.

People have been very kind. Someone left a coffee on my desk the first morning with "boss" written on the lid, which I am choosing to take as affection. Owen came by, looked at my new calendar over my shoulder, and said nothing at all, which from Owen is a speech.

To anyone who's been made responsible for other people's work: what was the hardest part to let go of?