On Editing

“Put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.”

– Colette

If writing is fire, I wonder if editing is ice.

Maybe that’s not quite right. Editing isn’t cold, per say, but it is definitely cool, and not in the sense that the Fonz is cool.

There’s a detachment to copyediting. It’s the blue to the writer’s red, the splash of water that controls the flame, tempers the blade. It’s calm. It’s discerning. It’s professional. Fundamentally, it’s impersonal.

Or, it should be.

I studied copyediting in college, and it was one of the most important classes I’ve taken in my life. It was taught by a professor who was a veteran of the publishing industry, and he gave us very candid and very blunt lectures on what it means to edit. The gist is that there’s far more involved to it than simply taking a look at a page of text and picking out the typos, the grammar mistakes, the lack of Oxford commas.

So much of the psychology of copyediting, I learned, revolves around the editor’s role as the mediator. He or she serves as the middle ground between everyone and everything, trying hard to keep the peace. Between whom, you ask? Well, between author and text, text and publisher, author and publisher, author and author, and more. The editor isn’t just a grammar nerd; some of their other part-time roles include diplomat, negotiator, salesman, and translator.

Yes, you read that right, translator. The publisher’s mission—after all—is to sell books, and the author’s mission—oftentimes—is to make art. Those are two very different languages, and it’s the editor’s job to somehow facilitate communication between the two parties so that war doesn’t break out and both groups can get what they want. Most of the time the editor does this by waving their hands around and making clicking noises.

But that’s not even the most outlandish role of the editor, which falls somewhere between therapist and spirit guide.

My professor told us a story of his time as an editor in the industry. He had a working relationship with an author who produced regular novels for his publishing company. She was a good writer who wrote often and whose books sold well, and thus the publisher was understandably rather fond of her. But she also liked to talk an awful lot about her chihuahuas. She could converse for hours about the little guys. Their personalities, their funny habits, their frightening illnesses, the political intrigue of their dominance hierarchy. And one of her favorite people to talk at just happened to be her editor—my professor.

Well, anyway, one day my professor was so stressed by his overwhelming workload that when he answered her biweekly call and she began to get into the latest power grab attempted by her smallest chihuahua, he politely but firmly told her he didn’t have the time to talk about her dogs, and the phone call ended cordially.

Or so he believed.

Some fifteen minutes later, my professor’s boss came storming into my professor’s office red in the face. He told my professor that he had just gotten off the phone with the author and she had told him that she wasn’t sure she could do further business with their publishing company, in particular with an editor who wouldn’t even take the time to occasionally have polite conversations with her about her precious little ones. My professor was ordered by his boss in no uncertain terms to get back on the phone with the lady and have a bloody discussion with her about her bloody dogs.

And so he did. And would continue to do so, acting as both the woman’s copyeditor and her shrink.

As for spirit guide, in this particular class there was an emphasis placed on the writer as the “artsy-flakey type” to the editor’s “calm, pragmatic type”. The author—a font of creative energy—might hand in a manuscript that touches upon the Fundamental Truth. He might tell his editor that he believes he is close to unlocking the Seventh Seal, breaking free of Samsara, achieving Total Universal Reminiscence of his past lives. And, look, it’s all right there on the page!

The editor, meanwhile, takes a look at the manuscript and sees the incoherent ramblings of a madman. But, perhaps, if you flip these paragraphs around . . . and maybe move that sentence from here to there . . . and get rid of that comma . . . ah, now it approaches something resembling a story that can be sold on the market.

If the author is the pilgrim on his spirit journey making the climb, then it’s the editor’s job to make sure he gets off the bloody mountain alright. You know, keep him away from the venomous snakes, guide him around the pitfalls, grab him and hold him down so that he doesn’t go running out into a thunderstorm because he wants to “feel the breath of the lightning”.

In other words: Be the good shepherd, and help guide new stories into being.