At The Writer this week and next, we're giving our January articles the last word-for-word edit and space-fitting them right to the line. I wish there was an elegant way to put this, but this process has always reminded me of the sausage-making analogy that you usually hear applied to the process of making laws. Many is the time, I suspect, that a weary magazine editor has gone home at night and told a significant other, "If readers (or the writer) had any idea how much work went into making that article look perfect …"

If every article fit its space perfectly, of course, there wouldn't be any blood on the floor. But there are way too many variables for this to happen all the time. Yes, editors try to make careful, educated guesses on word counts when assigning articles—and we often do guess right. A good guess means we can take out a scalpel and quickly get a story to fit to the line.

Then there are the bad-guess articles, which can be due to many variables, among them: I didn't allow enough for a sidebar in figuring the word count; we came up with a good illustration idea that's impacting the space for text; the writer was a bad boy and exceeded his word count; the original article had some holes in it and by the time we got done filling them, the length had grown. The worst-case scenario on these overgrown articles is that we have to take out a chain saw rather than a scalpel. I'm joking, of course (aren't I?); it just seems like that because a sizable trim is often involved.

Whether a scalpel or chain saw is used, however, it is a source of delight to hear back from a writer that he or she barely noticed the difference.

--Ron Kovach, senior editor 

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