What makes a good editor?


Almost Famous Writer called me up the other day, and for one of the few times ever we started talking about writing.* Specifically, the role and importance of editors. And what makes a good one.

Now as I often tell people, no writer worth buying a beer for at the bar will actually admit that he needs an editor, or even that an editor improved a manuscript. Oh, a writer will say that when there are editors in the audience, especially at a convention or some such. But that's just because we're expected to, like an Academy Awards winner is expected to thank his mom and third grade teacher. Agents definitely encourage it, because it increases the chances of getting a new contract.

But the truth is - gasp - an editor can help a writer improve a manuscript. In fact, not just good editors. I would say that I've probably learned more about writing from bad editors - of whom I've had more than a few - than from good ones. And I say that as someone who, in the distant, much forgotten past, was an editor himself. (Not of books, with a couple of minor exceptions. Yes, I often think now that I am paying for my own past sins.)

But it's much easier for a book to get better if a good editor is working with you.

What makes a good editor? You would think that would be an easy question to answer, but our conversation abruptly died when we began considering it.

Certainly, editing is as personal as writing. And because of that, certain editors will work best with certain writers, and on certain works. Still, I think there are general principles or qualities common to all good editors.

The first is a concern and attention to work on its terms - they see the book not as what they would write, or even what might have been written under other circumstances, but for what it is trying to do. Now I know that sounds a bit, uh, artsy, especially coming from a "working writer" - aka commercial writer, aka someone who writes for the mass market, aka someone who cares (and has to care) about sales. But I still think it's a fair assessment: a book is first a piece of art, and therefore has its own soul as well as body, and must be treated with respect. To be effective, an editor must perceive that soul - must see what the book is about and trying to achieve - before he can do anything else.

This isn't as easy as it sounds. For one thing, it requires time - which most editors today don't have a lot of. It also requires an ability to put one's own ego aside - probably easier for editors than writers, admittedly, but still not an easy task.

The second thing a good editor requires is an ability to communicate his points and perceptions in very brief but overarching ways. He needs to be able to see the common thread that runs through a number of missteps by the author, diagnose the problem, and then communicate them in the fewest sentences possible. Why? Because if his notes concentrate too much on individual points, the writer will very likely lose the forest for the trees. And I think that generally, it's the orientation of the forest that is the problem; if a writer is planting trees in the wrong place, it's because he's lost his map to that bit of the forest. Cutting down a few saplings here and there while planting others will not necessarily make the forest any better if he can't find the map; indeed, it often makes it worse.

There's also the very real danger of the writer simply getting exhausted pruning those trees, or rolling his eyes when he sees how many are marked for replanting. This may be a personal preference, but in my experience the best fiction editors I've ever had provided a relatively small amount of notes, but each went to the core of the work. And I should say that a small amount of notes can lead to very many, many changes.

An editor's enthusiasm for the work is certainly useful and welcome, but by itself is not necessarily going to help you make it better. One of the worst muddles I ever fell into happened precisely because of the editor's (and my) enthusiasm for a work . . . but that's another story.

It probably goes without say that an editor should have a decent amount of respect for the writer, or at least fake it pretty well. This doesn't mean that he editor completely agrees with everything the writer does or even pretends to. On the contrary, it seems to me respect demands honest disagreement, and at times even brutal criticism. "This is the worst piece of horseshit anyone has written in the past five hundred years" may be going a bit too far, but it's preferable to the sentence "Perfect! a perfect novel!" when that sentence introduces a fifty page edit letter proving exactly the opposite.

There are other qualifications for a good editor, I think, but our conversation was cut short by more pressing matters. Perhaps we'll return to it in the future.

(I used the masculine pronoun throughout this, but let me acknowledge that I have had some excellent women editors. There are definite differences in the way women editors interact with writers - or at least with me - but those differences have not made them better or worse than their male counterparts. At least not that I could tell.)

* As opposed to bitching and moaning about various industry injustices and the elimination of good cigar bars in NY. This we talk about all the time.