The Dirty Truth

If you were to poke around, such as by reading the excellent book Editors on Editing you’d be ahead of the game in understanding the publishing business and how editors think. I can say from experience though that there’s something they don’t tell you. Whenever an editor is interviewed or tasked to write down what they think, or their process, or how they got into the business, they always stress certain things. A love of books as a medium. An understanding of your target audience. A rapport with your authors. And of course all that boring mundane stuff that you need talent and training for. An eye for ideas, an ear for dialogue, and an obsessive nature to fix comma splices and shit. But that’s as far as the editors go. Oooh, they’re obsessive. Scary. That’s right up there with the job interviewee saying their biggest flaw is that they’re a perfectionist. Please. ‘Sides, that stuff gets foisted off on the copy editors. Editor editors note it, fix some of it, but they’re concerned with fun stuff. Development. Plot. Characterization. Consistency of concept and character. The real nitty gritty- double checking the time line, fact checking, when to use a dash and when to use a semi colon and all those boring jobs are left to the copy editors. I mean, should I have used a dash there? Fucked if I know. I could surely figure it out. But proof reading? Man, that is soooooo beneath me.

Of course, I say this a bit facetiously. Copy editors have a tough job and they work their asses off. Also, if you ask them, the best editors have some experience in copy editing. What I’m driving at is that the great strength of editors is also their great weakness. Consequently, they don’t want to share it for fear of looking weak, but with the industry as it is, I say editors should keep it transparent. It will only improve rapport with authors and show people just what it is you really do and why you work eighty hours a week.

The truth is simple: Editors have a god complex. Yes, every single one of them. And anyone who wants to edit too. Indeed, in my experience dealing with editors of books, trade journals and my professors when I got my MS in publishing (as well as my classmates) most people with an interest in editing are just like you, the author. Since I can’t (or more accurately I probably shouldn’t) speak specifics about others I’ll just use myself as an example. I decided I wanted to be a writer at the age of five. I built up a writer’s mentality, the way I thought it was meant to be. Keep your eyes open. Never know what could make good story fodder. Listen to the way people really speak. Never take criticism personally. Be prepared to fight tooth and nail for or against something for logical, consistent, demonstrable reasons.

Before I knew it, even though I couldn’t honestly say I liked my own writing or thought very highly of my chances of ever being published, I had classmates and coworkers hunting me down to edit their stuff. Short stories. Novels. Novellas. Comics. Screen plays. Stage plays. Even research papers. I’ve actually edited a couple of award winning theses, believe it or not.

The point is, when I tried to train myself to write, I wound up teaching myself more than anything about editing. I learned to like it. This is how editors are. They want respect because that gives them power. Power to influence your work. Their ability to influence means they can make things better. Making them better gets respect. See? A beautiful circle, isn’t it? It’s really very messianic. You know how many writers start out thinking they’ll save the world through their words? Yeah. That’ll happen. And editors certainly love to disabuse people of that notion. You’d think editors would be the authors that wised up, who were too pragmatic for that. You’d be wrong. An editor is a writer who never gave up on saving the world. And you’re right that they’re pragmatic, which is why they’re torn and ultimately realize that one book, nor ten or however many they might conceivably be able to pen is not going to save anything. So instead they hedge bets, diffusing their abilities into hundreds of books as editor rather than a handful as author, always on the search for that world shaking perfect book.