Why Editors Should Not Be Shot
Do you watch House M.D.? On the third season’s last DVD there’s a short sequence on how some of the show’s cast and crew got a little jazz band together – Hugh Laurie himself at the piano (and yes, he even plays “Minnie the Moocher” for all those Jeeves and Wooster fans out there).
At one point in the sequence, Laurie mentions that, until now, he had been under the impression that producers had the sole responsibility of driving expensive cars around.
I had been under a similar impression about editors. I wasn’t so naïve as to think that they could afford expensive cars, but I was certain that their sole responsibility was to tap writers on the head with their magic wand and turn them into authors. Oh, and they also corrected spelling errors.
As it turns out, editors do actually work; and their work is much different than I had expected.
I need to drop the producer metaphor here and take up a football metaphor.
Lots of people watch football on television or at their local high school. If a young person (let’s call him Bill), who had watched many of these games, decides to play football with some friends, he doubtless has no trouble going through the motions he had seen in previous games: hiking the ball, throwing it, tackling, running.
Perhaps Bill plays football with his friends for years, and eventually feels that he has the talent to play in the professional leagues. He shows up at the door of the local professional team and presents himself as player material.
But he finds that he can’t even get past the secretary. “I’m a perfectly good football player,” Bill tells her, “I always get picked first in games, and they always have me play quarterback.”
The secretary is compassionate and gives him a phone number. “Call this guy,” she says, “He can help.”
The guy turns out to be a bodybuilding coach. He takes one look at Bill and says, “Boy, you gotta bulk up if you want to get into the big leagues.”
It takes years of work, and not just the work of running and lifting weights, it takes precision work. The bodybuilding coach knows how the body works, he knows which muscles need to be strengthened and how. It also hurts. Bill discovers muscles he never knew existed.
“So when I finally have the muscles, then can I play?” he asks his coach
His coach shakes his head, “You have to actually know how to play football,” he replies.
“But I do know how to play football,” Bill says.
The coach writes down a phone number, “Give this guy a call.”
It turns out to be the number of the local high school football coach. Bill has four more years of work ahead of him, learning how the game of football (on the high school level) actually works, with all the rules in place. He starts to see that a huge array of skills and knowledge that he had never even thought of underlie the playing of football. Watching it on television, football had always looked so easy.
Bill graduates from high school, having become an all-state player. He believes he is ready for the big leagues now. But he still has to compete successfully in college – another four years. And then, if he works hard and has a bit of luck, he might find his way onto a professional team, where his learning curve will begin yet again.
During each of these periods in Bill’s training, he had to have a coach. And, as you may know, coaches aren’t there to tell you what a good job you are doing. They aren’t there to tap you with a magic wand and turn you into a football player. They aren’t there to say nice things about you to the reporters. They are there to force you into the painful work of actually becoming a football player. They are there to explode your preconceptions of how easy football is and train you in the skills invisible to the crowd. They are there because they know, in depth, how the game works.
You probably see where I’m going by now. I used to think that learning to write was a solitary pursuit. You read books and sat at your computer typing. Sometimes you would show your work to a friend or relative, and they would say it was great stuff. So you thought maybe, just maybe, you could make it to the big leagues.
However, writing has been around longer than football and it is just as demanding if you want to get into the big leagues. You need someone who knows writing to help you bulk up: learn your way around a good sentence, paragraph, character, chapter and story. You need coaches who are willing to say, “Sorry kid, there’s a lot more to it than that. Get to work.” Then you need coaches to force you into the painful work of learning to actually play the game; and there are a lot of different games in writing, each with its own set of rules and lore.
Editing, frankly, is often about pain – and always about work. A few years ago I signed up for a class with Alane Ferguson, an Edgar-award winning author whose writing I admire. Sadly, she had to cancel. I wrote, asking her why. She said she was in the middle of a “hideous” revision. “I’m not sleeping, just working and slogging and wishing the revision was OVER!”
This from a professional author. I’d bet money that this revision was not self-inflicted; it was doubtless foisted upon her by her editor. But take look at the product. Alane’s work is so finely tuned that it becomes invisible, allowing the reader to fully enter the story. But it did not come without pain.
After reading all this, you’re probably thinking, “I’m not going to send any of my stuff to Sunstone. Stephen sounds mean!” Don’t worry; I’m a very nice magazine editor. I actually do a lot of your revision for you. In other words, the majority of the time I don’t say “Change this and change that,” I actually make the changes (while keeping the “track changes” function turned on, of course, so you can go through to accept and reject the edits). I also try to give commentary on why I make particular revisions so that the author can see my reasoning.
But I’m a great believer in the author’s abilities. A few times, an author has rejected my actual verbiage whole-hog, but has taken the idea behind the words and used it as a launching pad to do some really fantastic stuff.
I love it when that happens. It means I have a real writer on my hands, someone who takes his or her work seriously. I feel like a football coach watching a player I’ve been working with perform a fast break and plow gloriously into the end zone.
In the end, writing and editing are collaborative projects, each flourishing on the commitment, skill, and investment of the other.
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January 14th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
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There comes a time in every good writer’s life, I believe, where they humble themselves enough to realize they need an editor to take them the rest of the way. Sometimes that need is met by a writers’ group or other firstreaders, but ultimately, there’s only so far the lone writer can get without the help of others.
Working at a high school, I see a lot of talent that refuses refuses refuses to rewrite. They can see their own raw talent and expect to be worshiped. Ain’t gonna happen kid. But I can help you if you’re interested.
January 14th, 2009 at 6:35 pm
I don’t know that editors should be shot, but sometimes they need to be roughed up a bit.
January 15th, 2009 at 10:02 am
I like thinking of being an editor as a the role like being a coach.
That said, my stint as an editor was very short lived.
January 15th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
Was it short-lived? If so, Johnna, it was only because your amazing skills were needed in other directions, and there is only so much time in a day.
I’m still growing into the editing role. I’m much better at articulating how an essay could be improved than I am at communicating and working with an author effectively.
January 15th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
Emily totally underestimates her skills as an editor. She is fabulous– and much better than she realizes with the people-skills side of things.
For me, the hardest thing is trying to strike the balance between being encouraging (or being encouraged, when I’m approaching editing as a writer) and being helpful, which sometimes requires toughness. It’s a much different process than grading papers as a teacher, where the end result is good enough work to get a desired grade, but where the audience is really an audience of one.
January 15th, 2009 at 8:07 pm
Thanks, Shelah. I needed that.
I still feel bumbling, though; I love editing essays within our staff. Outside, though, is not always so easy.
And what you say about grading papers versus editing is so interesting–as a student I wrote “good enough” papers all the time, but I hardly ever polished them up. Most of my teachers were too overloaded with papers to grade to help me take my writing to that level, anyway.
January 15th, 2009 at 9:01 pm
I think it’s hard to find some middle ground between completely rewriting things the way I would have said them, and simply pointing out what’s wrong and telling the author to fix it. The temptation to foist one’s own style on everyone is huge (at least it is for me). So if all of a sudden every article in Dialogue has 47 em-dashes and 200 semi-colons, you’ll know that I’ve given in.
January 16th, 2009 at 8:25 am
And if it has 200 em-dashes and 47 semi-colons, you’ll know I’ve hijacked Dialogue.
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Although I understand the temptation to rewrite, I don’t quite get why you can’t just point out what’s wrong and let the author fix it. If the author doesn’t know how to fix it, then perhaps some suggestions and/or modeling are in order.
Hmmm. I guess I don’t disagree at all with what Kristine says, but think that when it comes to finding the middle ground, editors default stance should be well within the writer’s territory.
January 16th, 2009 at 9:04 am
What I’ve been doing so far:
At the beginning I stick with global edits. I find that 1/3 of the article usually is still inside the writer’s head: themes have been started, but not explored, some lines of argument are vague, examples are sparse, there’s no unifying metaphor, the thesis is buried etc. I point out the places that can be fleshed out and give ideas for further exploration. But sometimes I feel like the best way I can help the writer see what I’m getting at is to actually write it. I always try to make it clear to the writer that this is just my slap-dash version and that the writer is totally free to do anything he or she wants with it. And, as I said in the original post, I really like it when the writer takes initiative and uses my suggestion as a launching pad, rather than actually taking what I’ve written.
Then I get into the logic of the article, which is often the most intense part of the process. It’s sometimes a challenge to find a logic that resonates with the ethos of the article, but when it does finally emerge, it’s quite satisfying.
After that, it’s all a matter of wordcraft and getting all those little bits of punctuation into their places. Carol, my associate editor, is a tremendous help here.
Of course, then there’s the page design and digging up illustrations. I really like this part, even though it’s a lot of work and sometimes frustrating. If I have the time, I just love to find the PERFECT illustration that captures the essay’s essence.
February 3rd, 2009 at 12:08 pm
Stephen wrote:
“I point out the places that can be fleshed out and give ideas for further exploration. But sometimes I feel like the best way I can help the writer see what I’m getting at is to actually write it.”
To which I respond: Yes. Writers often need an example in order to see what you’re getting at. (And I as a writer often find it helpful.) Besides, it’s often more easy as a writer to respond to *something* than to simply attempt to fix problems.
It’s also worth considering that not all writing is by people who consider themselves writers. Working with circumstances like that, it’s often a fine line between editing and rewriting. And that’s fine, if it’s appropriate to the situation. I suppose that’s probably different, though, from what Stephen and most of the other people in this thread are talking about.
I also have to say, sadly, that from what I’ve heard from friends in the professional publishing world, this kind of in-depth editing is far more rare than it used to be. I’ve had one friend who told me that his nationally published novel got: one day of the editor’s time. For the kind of in-depth comments he wanted, he had to recruit readers on his own in order to polish and improve his writing.
May 9th, 2010 at 6:45 am
I love Dr. House and i always watch this TV series after my day job..`*
October 19th, 2010 at 3:27 am
Dr. House is really the best, i love his character and he is a medical genious too.`’