In the past six months I’ve had the amazing privilege of working with four very different editors for three of my published and one soon-to-be-published works. These experiences have ranged from a single round of edits to the multiple-rounds that are still on going with my novel. Each editor had a different style, looked for different things, had a different timeline. With so many variables, it is difficult to come up with sound advice regarding the editor/writer relationship, yet I find I do have some words of wisdom that may help newly published or about-to-be-newly-published writers navigate these scary waters.
Trust your editor.
Agent Jessica Faust of Bookends Literary Agency says just that in her blog post Trusting Your Editor. “I don’t ever think you should have an editor you don’t feel you should be able to say a word to…An author-editor relationship is a partnership. You’re both trying to make your book stronger.”
In the best of all possible worlds, you did thorough research into the publishing house you submitted your ms. to. You looked at some of the books that publisher released to judge the quality of the writing/editing. If you knew authors who published with that house, you asked them about their experience with the editor. If you did not do this before, do it now. Forewarned is forearmed. (It’s a cliché, but it got to be that way for a reason.) Knowing your editor before you work together may help smooth the path to a good working relationship.
If you go into the editing process knowing that the house wants things a certain way or a particular editor doesn’t like certain things, you will not be devastated when your first round of edits arrives lit up like a Christmas tree with multi-colored strands of highlights. The first round of editing I ever received convinced me that I should never have submitted the manuscript in the first place–there was too much wrong for it to be good. My editor convinced me this was not the case, but that there was work to do.
This is a major task of the editor–to convince the writer that a fresh set of keen, trained eyes, knows better than your eyes that see only wonderful characters and brilliant dialogue. The editor sees this and more. They see misplaced commas, disagreement between subject and verb, unnecessary words that hinder rather than help your prose, and wandering body parts. (Eyes do not dart around the room nor do fingers entangle themselves in hair.)
Like a sculptor who chips away at the rough-hewn block of marble, removing the unneeded chips, smoothing the planes, gouging here to make that one line deeper and therefore more meaningful to the viewer, so does the editor attempt to make your manuscript more meaningful and pleasurable to the reader.
And this is where collaboration comes in. Because you, the author, have the final say (well, mostly final say). You have the right to refuse any and all edits except for those that are set by house style. If the house style says that you cannot have a semi-colon used in dialogue, they you cannot have it. End of story. Otherwise, edits are up for negotiation. You can refuse them. If you do, your editor will probably re-insist in the second round. And from what I’ve heard, some fights have broken out over such things. Try, however, to come to an accord that you can both live with.
My best advice is to give all edits due consideration before rejecting them. If your editor has not supplied a reason for a change, and you feel very strongly about altering the material in question, ask them to explain. This may sound like a simple suggestion, but for me it works. During the editing for Hog Wild, my editor suggested cutting part of my chapter titles. I really didn’t want to do that. The book was a Fractured Fairytale and this particular part of the title I thought sounded very much like the titles in a children’s book and I wanted to make that connection. After I rejected that edit twice, the editor asked me my reason for wanting to keep it and when I explained she wrote, in effect, “This is an erotic story–do you really want your reader to think of Winnie the Pooh?” I changed it.
The moral of the story: pick your battles wisely.
I have not spoken about the problems of finding an editor if you are self-publishing, but author Vicki Tyley’s article The Editor: A Writer’s Fairy Godmother or Ogre for The American Editor explains the various levels of editing, how necessary editing is to your work if you are self-publishing, and how essential it is to find your Fairy Godmother Editor before committing to the relationship.
What has been your experience with editors? Good, bad, ugly? Do you find yourself mostly accepting or rejecting edits or is it totally dependent on the work in question/editor in question? With the rise of self-publishing, do you think we will eventually see the switch from Literary Agencies to Editorial Agencies?
Jenna Jaxon Romance--because passion is timeless. 