Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Mari, the Happy Wanderer's avatar

I am a professional editor, so it was fascinating for me to see your perspective from the other side of the editorial process! You are right that editing needs to be a collaboration, but that ultimately the work belongs to the author. Good editors work hard to preserve the author’s unique voice and to resist the temptation to take over and impose ourselves on the author’s work. In my opinion Lish wasn’t a good editor, because his extreme edits distorted and violated his authors’ original works.

I agree that the best editors are happy to get pushback from authors—and I will counter that the best authors are happy to accept editing and to admit that an editor can improve their work. (Good editing, that is. I used to write and edit for a magazine in Prague, and an inexperienced editor once destroyed a piece of mine out of her own ignorance. As one example, the verbs in the first clause of one sentence were in the past tense because the clause was discussing the past. The second clause’s verbs were in the present tense because the clause was discussing the present. The editor made all the verbs present-tense, citing a “rule” that all verbs have to be the same tense. No they don’t.) It was incredibly frustrating for me as an editor at the University of Chicago Press to spend hours trying to wrest some sense out of a piece of incoherent academic gobbledygook, only to have the piece returned to me with a giant STET EVERYTHING at the top. (This really happened to me more than once, and I cannot begin to express how terrible the writing was in these pieces, but we editors have to let authors—even awful ones—have the final say.) In my experience authors who care about their craft have the humility to realize that they may have erred in places, and that another set of eyes can catch infelicities they might have missed.

All that being said, fiction writers get a lot more leeway than nonfiction writers, and if I had been your editor, I would never have messed with your commas!

Expand full comment
Charles E. Brown's avatar

I have been on both sides of the Editor's Pen so know a bit of what you are saying. The hardest thing for an editor to do is divorce themselves from their own personal style to see whether or not someone else's style also works (and some never get past this).

The hardest thing for a writer is to get a lot of editorial feedback without explanation, just criticism and suggested changes with no rationale given.

It requires walking a tightrope I suspect...

Expand full comment
5 more comments...

No posts