What exactly is an editor?

Question

I recently read the assertion that many great works of fiction were chiefly down the contribution of a good editor. I must admit I was a little taken aback by this statement. I had never really thought of the writer and editor as being like the musician and producer. To what degree is this really true?I always liked to think that as the author I am the writer and the "producer" of my story an editor is just there to clean syntax glitches and polish spelling (they are also free to point out bits of the story they don't like but surely in most cases this is a matter of opinion). If I were to read the work of others and tell them "x doesn't work" I feel I'd probably get a bunch of abuse. I try always to appraise work as "I feel this is currently a problem because..." or "this would work better if..." I always think of this as critique, is this editing?I guess this question comes down to "What is an editor? How would one know a good one? What behaviour from an editor is appropriate?"

Answer 1

Likening the editor to a producer may be a stretch in many cases, but not necessarily. More to the point, however, is that your understanding of the editor's function appears unduly restrictive. The kind of tasks you associate with editing are more accurately characterized as proofreading, which generally concerns the evaluation of grammar, syntax, and diction. Editing, however, involves a wider range of discretion and creativity concerning all the elements of composition. Good editors have a superior grasp of rhetoric and its various components. The editor's skills largely consist in the superior cultivation of his or her intuition concerning the relative effectiveness of alternative modes and styles of composition. In this sense the editor is very much like the producer, helping to create a more refined product from the raw material provided.

Answer 2

I sense you are recoiling a bit from the notion of someone else raising your baby. This instinct is common to all writers, and is precisely why they need good editors.

A good editor is indeed a collaborator. If the writer is the artist with the vision, then the editor is the artist who helps him achieve that vision. From this perspective, the answer to the question, "what is appropriate for the editor to suggest?" is, "whatever will help the writer realize his vision."

Editors can certainly over-step, and when an editor tries to seize creative control from the writer, he has gone too far. But for the writer, who's primary effort has been to create, it is always difficult to throw away or change part of what he has created. So when an editor is trying to help a writer, often it feels to the writer like the editor is sabotaging him.

I recently edited a novel where a sexual assault was introduced to "heighten the stakes." The real goal of the novel was to depict the tragic death of a heroic young man. However, the shallow treatment of the assault, which had been perpetrated against the hero's love interest, pulled the reader completely out of his story. Indeed, the hero's own lack of reaction to the event (which the writer hadn't thought through) made him cease to seem like much of a hero, and as a consequence, his untimely death much less of a tragedy.

I had to convince the writer to either cut the episode (which was unnecessary to the story) or to give it it's due, lengthen the novel, and change it's focus late in the story. He had thought he was almost done with the novel. It was painful for me to send him back to the drawing board, and for him. But it would have been much more painful for us both to have had such a poorly executed passage in his published book.

Hope this helps.

Answer 3

An editor is responsible for commenting on broad themes, structural reorganization, ensuring clarity, etc. Polishing spelling and checking for grammatical errors is left to the proofreader.

Any writer will agree that it's not always easy to read their own work objectively! That's what makes editors so crucial. Editors provide a second lens. They offer critical feedback to ensure that a writer's work is effective. Of course, the editors would have no contribution if not for the text produced by an author, but I would agree with the claim that an editor's role is imperative to the success of any work.

For an editor, any critique is appropriate as long as it is constructive. "X doesn't work", might be far less beneficial than "I have an idea of what might work better than X, let's try this". In terms of fine tuning and specific polishing, that's the responsibility of a proofreader, who will read the work after an editor and an author have gone back and forth multiple times.