The Gift and Horror of Having an Editor

I hate horror films. I have an even more tenuous relationship with Google Docs. Anyone who thinks a collaborative platform for editing is a good idea must be an editor.

Recently I submitted a short article to an institution I will not name, to protect the guilty. They requested the submission through Google Docs, meaning I began receiving notifications as soon as the predators—I mean editors—attacked.

The person who had requested the article had already approved the language and content, so like your favorite, stupid, horror film heroine, I naïvely ran toward the notifications to investigate. Four editors in the communications department, all strangers, simultaneously picked the bones clean, bit by gory bit. Paralyzed, I watched the carnage live.

I remember manually closing my jaw with my hand.

I’ve been edited before—frequently, in fact; it doesn’t always make me feel so faint. But this institution follows a different house style than I do. The communications department is tasked with creating a uniform tone and language. They apparently feel no need to justify to the author, by query or comment, their optional, subjective changes. I felt ripped apart along with my work.

Having an Editor Is a Gift

Why, then, do I insist that having an editor is a gift, when being edited can feel this lousy?

Editors are the friendly fire
offering to misunderstand you
and shoot you down first,
so your reader won’t have to.

 Sounds fun, right?

As a writer and editor, I get to see both sides. Not all writers do the writing well; nor do all editors. But I promise that a good editor has your back and is invested in you, even when it hurts. Their job is to excise the fluff, the fat, and the faulty from your manuscript, to sharpen your points, to pick you apart and put you back together better than before. The good ones will let you keep your voice. The best will help you grow.

Below are a few ideas for how to cope with this painful process.

How to Cope with Having an Editor

Start well. Have you made conscious choices of word usage, syntax, structure, characterization, and idiom? Send your own style sheet to the editor along with the manuscript; don’t just wait for theirs. Editors may still disagree with you, but they won’t have to guess at your intentions. The guide will be a launching point for conversations. Most editors will thank you for helping them maintain intent and consistency throughout the manuscript.

Back up your artistic choices but keep an open mind for ways to improve. I once had an editor (a poor one) change all of my dialogue to grammatically correct sentences instead of leaving the syntax as people actually speak it—and he did so without using tracked changes, so that I had to manually reinstate everything back to a literary standard. In sending the manuscript (which had alternating narrative and non-narrative chapters) back to the publisher, I respectfully defended my changes, with citations, as well as requested they put another editor more familiar with editing fiction on the project.

But I also learned something in the process: due to the unusual mixing of straight nonfiction and fictional narrative, I had chosen to make my characters’ speech patterns less distinct than I usually do. How they spoke was close enough to written grammar that the uninformed editor saw their speech patterns as syntax mistakes rather than characterization and good dialogue. The better artistic decision would have been to push their words closer to the fragments and incorrectness of real speech. I see that now because of that editor. Thank you, Mr. Editor.

View the process as a dress rehearsal for the real battle. As I watched my Google Doc die a slow death and then mostly rise up again like a good horror-film villain, I realized that among the many changes I didn’t like, only one mattered: the place where they altered the meaning of my main point. Although I had started with a Scripture quotation that said what I was saying, the point I was making sounded different from how we often hear it. I was emphasizing a few tiny words people often leave out. The editors revised that sentence, deleting those tiny words, and changed my meaning to the more familiar one.

So the only comment I made in the carnage full of red marks was to indicate my preference to restore those two deleted words. I explained their importance and asked for help reframing the sentence to make sure I got my point across. If the editors missed my point, readers would too.

Putting the right words on the page is no guarantee they will hit their mark. When you are saying something new or different, make sure you frame it well. Attention is a fickle companion, and readers fill in what they are reading with what they expect to read rather than what they see. So even if friendly fire hurts, it shows what readers will think you are saying—and how you must prepare the reader to see what you truly intend.

Avoid watching the process live. Unless you have a strong stomach for gore, wait until the process is complete. Pray for a receptive frame of mind to review edits. Channel some detachment from your original work. And consciously choose to believe that your editor cares.