You’re working with an editor. She is experienced and well regarded. You have confidence in her. Then she sends you her comments, and you read them with mounting . . . hmmm, let’s use the word “consternation.” You discover that this villain disguised as an editing professional has stained your luminous prose with blue ink, sullied your manuscript with ugly words like “awkward” and “weak,” and completely overlooked its obvious radiance and dexterity. Your blood pressure moves into the danger zone. You are horrified. You are indignant. But are you right?
Few professional relationships are trickier than that between author and editor. After all, you’re paying someone to tell you what’s wrong with the work you devoted months and years of your life to. What could go wrong there?
For editors, the challenge is to be insightful, honest, and diplomatic all at once. Difficult, to say the least. But in some ways, the author’s challenge is even greater. We have to listen to critiques of our work without letting them discourage us. We have to turn off our egos and detach ourselves from the years of love, devotion, and pain we went through to get our work onto the page. Sometimes we have to be able to admit to ourselves that the passage we thought of as a supernova is more like a desk lamp. This may be the hardest thing you do as a writer.
Years ago, I was invited to sit in on a writing group. Despite not being the writing-group type—some writers are, some aren’t—I went out of curiosity and a desire to connect with others of my kind in the little farm town I was living in.
The first person who shared his work was an aspiring mystery writer who had recently hired an editor to review his novel. One of her comments: “I’m just not sure this is a mystery.” The author found this comment offensive and ludicrous. He repeated it to the group in a sardonic tone, rolled his eyes, and informed us all that he was simply going to ignore it. “The editor’s an idiot,” he said. “It’s perfectly clear that this novel is a mystery.” Except, of course, it wasn’t perfectly clear. That’s what the editor was trying to tell him.
It struck me at the time that rejecting editors’ comments wholesale is a sure sign of amateur status. This editor had offered the would-be mystery writer a gem of information: This book doesn’t fulfill what publishers and readers are looking for in a novel fitting the mystery genre. Instead of realizing how valuable that advice was, the writer derided the editor’s opinion and ignored it. The last I heard, he remains unpublished.
But does this mean that the editor is always right? Is it universally advisable to do as an editor tells you, even when your heart is screaming against it? No.
Editors are not infallible. They make mistakes like the rest of us. They also have their own personal tastes and their sometimes idiosyncratic notions of what makes for good writing. I’ve worked with editors who saved my life—or at least my career. I’ve also worked with ones who did me significant professional harm: One caused me to lose a skilled and dedicated agent.
So how do you know when to listen to your editor and when not to? There is no clear-cut answer to that question. But there are some guidelines you can refer to—some qualities to seek out in an editor, and others that signal trouble ahead. In the next installment, I’ll list a few things I think are clear signs you should dump your editor and find another.