your editor is not your enemy

on writing as collaboration

to write is human, to edit is divine

- Stephen King, On Writing

A few years ago I went to a book launch where, during the interview, the author proudly and repeatedly stated that they had not allowed their novel to be edited. The reasons given were something to do with capturing a moment, something about authenticity; I suspect it was that the author thought themselves, their project, above critique. By the end of the event, I had zero interest in reading the book—but I had already paid for it, and it had a good cover. So I took it home, and I read it. And it was, of course, awful.

You don’t have to look far in the canon of writers talking about writing to find the weird trope that editing is somehow an assault on the writer; that the job of an editor is to ruin a book and the job of a writer is to stop them.

You would think, from this, that a writer’s relationship with editing is always fraught. This is not the case. Editing, when done well, is a gift. Of course, we have all been edited badly to some extent; I have had an American magazine ask me to send work in, then suggested a terrible change to the story, then send me an unsolicited grading (B-) when I declined the change. I’ve had copyeditors who destroyed a manuscript. There are bad editors, just like there are bad writers. But if you, as a writer, consider the process of editing to be necessarily negative, as something to be resisted at all costs, then you, I’m afraid, are robbing yourself and your readers.

---

There is perhaps nothing more destructive to the end quality of your book than thinking you’ve written a flawless work of genius that doesn’t need to be touched. A writer does, of course, need an ego; you would never put pen to paper if you didn’t have one, let alone take the enormous risk of putting that work out into the world for all and sundry to critique it. You need confidence to carry you through the process of creation, which is brutal and beautiful in equal measure, and will have you thinking you’re basically Gabriel Garcia Marquez one minute and a disgusting failure the next. But once the writing is over, you have to accept that everything that was in your head might not have made it to the page—or perhaps that your grand ideas didn’t quite pan out in a way that readers can access. There are a hundred ways that your vision might not have successfully birthed itself. As the writer of the book, you can only ever be semi-objective about its success as an artistic project. When you’ve exhausted your self-editing capabilities, you have to let someone else in. As Stephen King puts it in his book On Writing (one of the best about the craft, I think): you have to write with the door closed, and edit with the door open.

If you are lucky, like me, you might have a very talented and equally honest workshop group with whom you share all your work before it ever gets sent to your agent or your editor. These need to be your friends, but not, I think, your partner. Your partner is too likely to be a relentless supporter, the person you need when you’ve melted out of your desk chair having had all the confidence drained out of you. Your workshop group needs to be able to say, in those extreme circumstances when you’ve written something severely lacking: I love you, but this just isn’t very good.

Whether your first port of call is your editor or your agent or your workshop group, the entire point is that they can save you before you really embarrass yourself. They are your Universal Reader by proxy, picking up your book with none of the context of you or your intentions or your history or your emotions, taking it solely as a piece of artwork, hoping that it moves them. They are the ones who can be objective where you cannot. Your editor, who is also taking a risk on your book, truly wants it to be fantastic and sell a hundred thousand copies. They are the ones responsible for investing the publisher’s money in your novel, and if it flops, it will come down on them. They, like you, want the book to be an artistic tour de force, a relatable and hilarious look at modern dating life, a hard sci fi bestseller—whatever it is your book really is. They want your book to be the most successful version of itself. And if they can’t tell you that there are issues with it because you won’t listen, neither of you will succeed.

Everyone writes something shit sometimes. It happens. The longer your career, the more likely it is. You might get better at writing, but you also might become more self-indulgent, more obsessed with your particular linguistic traits. Like the author up top, you might have written something that doesn’t have any real narrative purpose, because you don’t really have anything to say with it. The characters might be too rigid, too similar to each other. You might have muddled your timelines, become overwrought in your syntax. All these are fixable issues. But only if you let someone help you fix them.

---

I was surprised, this week, to read the phrase kill your darlings offered up as a piece of bad advice on Toby Litt’s excellent daily writing substack A Writer’s Diary; for me, kill your darlings is one of those highly annoying pieces of wisdom: you don’t want it to be true, but it is.

What kill your darlings means is not that you should remove the parts of the book that you like the most, but that the lines that you thought were oh so clever, oh so literary will almost certainly stand out like a sore thumb in the finished book. We all have them; the lines or sentences or scenes that make us sit back and go: look at that. Look what what I’ve done there. Isn’t that good? Christ, I’m wonderful.

The issue with darling lines (or scenes) is twofold: one, they are almost certainly never as clever as you think. I’ve read so many books when you can tell the author thinks they’ve got a real zinger, but actually it’s hugely clichéd, kind of nonsensical or so bad it elicits an audible groan. Two: they show the writer, leaning back smugly in the chair, to the reader. You do not want to be seen by your reader, thinking you’re very clever, a spotlight suddenly swinging onto you and pulling all attention away from the story, the writing. The WOW parts of a book should slowly build, like an orgasm; like the last pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude, they should bring you up so slowly that you barely notice you’re hardly breathing, caught up in the rhythm and the build and the emotions until suddenly: it’s over. If you were walking down the street and you suddenly climaxed out of nowhere, wouldn’t that actually be intensely unsettling?

For the last couple of months I’ve been editing my second novel, with an editor who is new to me (thanks to my move to Doubleday). My new editor has edited friends of mine in the past, and I have loved the resulting books; in the pitch email they sent when my book was at auction, they showed that they understand not only what I write but my intentions for it, and where we, together, could improve upon its impact and quality. This, for a writer, is surely the dream.

On the first page of my manuscript there is a line that I had been trying to make work; I liked it, I liked its weird kind of vibe, its ability to sum up everything that would come afterwards in the book. But the lines before it were already quite heavy, in that they contained a lot and were quite stylised. I had moved the line a few times but knew it didn’t quite sit right. I got my first round edits back, and the line was cut. I caught my breath and read the paragraph again. It was much, much better without.

The best editors know that these changes can be difficult for a writer, fragile little neurotic creatures that we are. The standard response to a manuscript edit is to have a quiet little tantrum where you reject everything suggested, then have a stomp around the local park. A couple of days later you’ll go through it again and realise that 80% of what’s been suggested is for the best, and hold on to a few things that you think are actually necessary, and for the rest you’ll work together to see how you might find a middle ground between the two of you, or perhaps something new entirely that elevates the book to even higher heights. Editors know this—they’ve been through the editing process more than most writers ever will—so they hold you kindly, and they say things like these are only ever suggestions! and they point out something that they love under a paragraph that’s been subjected to a substantial cut. They hold you gently so that you can be gentle back, and when you send the manuscript over to them a second time, you’ve written things like this in the margins:

I needed someone to cut me loose from this sentence, so thank you.

---

I sometimes wonder if the reluctance to be edited is because we’re lead to believe that Proper Writers just vomit out gorgeous and perfect first drafts; that people like Donna Tartt and Zadie Smith and Percival Everett stare out the window for a few minutes and jot down an unimpeachable sentence, and they do that for the whole book, and then at the end it’s finished, ready to fly perfectly into the brain of their readers. By this reckoning, every writer who can’t achieve that is a terrible writer. But this simply has no grounding in reality; the truth is that almost everyone’s first draft is bad.

The analogy I use often is that writing is like pottery: you need some material on the wheel before you can make anything out of it. And the first draft is you just slapping clay onto the wheel: it’s a mess, and its shapeless, but it’s there. And it’s through editing and redrafting and editing and redrafting—with an editor that gets you—that you can turn this formless lump of matter into something very beautiful. But you can’t do it without that first messy part, and you can’t do it without opening that door, as Stephen King says, and letting your editor in.