How to Edit and Be Edited: A Guide for Writers and Editors

THE VALUE OF EDITING

The word editing covers a lot of ground. This book is not just about changing the words on the page. It is a guide for how best to frame the collaborative effort between two people—or between your creative mind and your critical mind—that is undertaken with one simple goal: to make a writer’s work as good as it can possibly be.

There is an important difference between editing—sometimes called big-picture editing, content editing or development editing—and copyediting. The overlap between them is known as line editing. A copyeditor corrects spelling and punctuation, points out repetition, tautology, wordiness or lack of clarity and suggests alternatives, and fact-checks proper names and any facts that look dubious. Line editing involves improving the writer’s prose style and storytelling, which will involve some rewriting and perhaps moving portions of text; it requires good literary judgment, but basic competency can, like copyediting, be taught. Big-picture editing is exactly what it sounds like: assessing the impact of the book as a whole on the reader, looking for weaknesses and absences (usually very hard to spot) as well as strengths that might be strengthened further.

When the editorial collaboration works at its best, ideas emerge which neither writer nor editor would have come up with on their own. Often it becomes impossible to distinguish which idea was whose.

Editing is an art as well as a skill. It requires sensitivity to both words and narrative, a sense of rhythm in language and storytelling, good general knowledge, the ability to connect emotionally with the material (or intellectually, in the case of business documents and some works of nonfiction) and, most importantly, the ability to imagine the potential that a written work might achieve. Editing is also personal; what one person loves about a book, a story, a screenplay, a marketing brochure, another may hate. This is why it’s so hard to teach, and why publishing courses tend not to try.

The best way to develop your judgment is to read lots of good books, magazine articles, screenplays, grant proposals or annual reports, and ask yourself why the good ones are better than the not-so-good ones. Your judgment will get stronger with experience. This book will help you along the way, by guiding you in what to look for in written work of various kinds.

All good editors follow a few common principles. Whether the writer–editor relationship is an inner dialogue or a collaboration, the same principles apply. This book elucidates those principles, which are based on what I consider to be the two basic rules of how to work with a writer, regardless of the format or subject matter, so as to get the best result from the collaboration.

Why have an editor at all? If you’re working in a business context, on commission for a magazine or news source, or with a professional publishing house, editorial input is a given. If you are self-publishing, you have the choice to skip this step—as many ill-advised writers do.

Be honest with yourself, and remember that it’s hard to be objective about your own work. If you really think there’s no room for improvement, fine—get your work printed up and send it out into the world. But before you invest that time and money, why not make sure that it’s as good as you can possibly make it?

If you’re hoping to be published by a professional house or in a magazine, either printed or online, you will need to impress the agents and editors who are gatekeepers to publication. It’s a competitive world out there, and you will only have one chance at each person. Usually they have far more work than the time they’ve got to do it in, and reading the work of writers who aren’t already on their list is a low priority. They’re looking for a reason to stop reading. It’s foolish to waste precious opportunities with untested work.

How do you get that feedback? By asking people whose judgment you trust to read your work. And how do you identify those people? They like the books and movies you like and can discuss them intelligently, or perhaps they’ve impressed you with their knowledge of the subject you’re writing about. And they don't bulldoze their opinions through the middle of a discussion. In other words, they have tact as well as judgment.

If you are already in an editorial job, or have been asked to read a writer’s work, you can assume that your tact and judgment are valued. Congratulations! You are well on your way to being one of the most valuable assets a writer can have.

Not all writers want to be edited. Even writers who understand the value of the process may dread it, or approach it with trepidation. As a general rule, the more professional the writer, the more amenable they are to editing—but the more impatient they are with bad editing.

Writing is an undertaking that requires courage. When you face a blank screen or page and put words on it, you’re creating something out of nothing. Usually, at least to begin with, it’s a pale reflection of what you’ve imagined. Ann Patchett describes the idea of a novel as a shimmering butterfly and the written work as the butterfly pinned down: less vibrant and less beautiful. For her, as for many writers, the finished work carries a whiff of disappointment: it may be as good as we can make it, but it’s never quite as wonderful as it was before it was pinned to the page.

There’s something about writing that brings out a feeling of vulnerability in almost everyone. Because we know how to form letters and employ the basic rules of grammar, we feel that it ought to be straightforward to express our thoughts in words. When a reader doesn’t find in those words what we hoped we’d put into them, we feel frustrated and inadequate. It’s very hard not to take criticism personally.

Bad editorial technique—which emphasizes what’s wrong rather than what’s strong or might be strengthened—puts the writer on the defensive, which is counterproductive in many ways. Feeling criticized makes a writer hang onto what they’ve already written, or it makes them lose confidence in their work or their abilities, or it makes them abandon their imaginative connection with the project and turn out a hack job.

Imagination only comes out to play when it feels safe.

This book was written for anyone who will be reading written work with the goal of improving it. Perhaps you are:

A writer

Reading over your own work can be scary. Approaching the revision process with the techniques of a good editor—in which weaknesses are seen as opportunities for exploration and expansion—defangs the inner critic. You will also be giving your work to early readers