In my years as a fiction editor, I have rarely met anyone outside of the publishing industry itself who has any real idea what it is that I do for a living. My own mother (before she passed away) was convinced that I spent my days correcting other people's spelling and punctuation, and she couldn't fathom how a daughter who'd routiniely flunked spelling tests had ended up with that job.
Part of the confusion derives from the term itself, since the word "editing" can apply to several different jobs within the book publishing field alone (and we won't even go into film or newspaper editing here). First, there's the acquisitions editor, charged with the task of deciding whether or not to publish a submitted manuscript (and all the business that goes along with this: obtaining support for the acquisition within the company, negotiating with the author or agent, etc.). If the book is successfully acquired, then this person usually (but not always) becomes the book's inhouse editor from here on in, helping the author to get their manuscript into the best possible creative shape. This editor, in turn, is usually (but not always) the manuscript's line editor as well. A line editor goes over the author's prose page by page, line by line, and word by word....suggesting cuts here, a change there, some revisions over there...whatever the manuscript needs. Judiciously done, this makes a good book even better (and can even turn a bad book into a readable one); while a clumsy or intrusive editor can harm a book or make an author feel savaged. (Nabakov famously referred to editors as "pompous avuncular brutes.") After going back and forth between writer and line editor (once, twice, sometimes several times), the finished manuscript then goes to the managing editor of the publishing company, who oversees its safe passage through the long production process. The managing editor then assigns the manuscript to a copy editor (usually a freelancer rather than someone on the publishing staff), who does a final check for things like spelling, grammar, consistency, and the like. After that comes the proofreader...and, finally, a printed book. (So what kind of editor am I, then? Definitely not the one checking the spelling.)
To add to the confusion, there's also a difference between editing a line of books at a publishing company (as I used to do, when I lived in New York), and editing anthologies (as I do today). In the former role, the best editors practice the art of invisibility. Our job is to help the authors shine, not to step into the spotlight ourselves; to help them express their creative visions, not re-shape their books according to our own. Okay, we might argue a point forcefully if we feel that it's in the best interest of the book -- but it's the writer's name on the cover, not ours, and the writer has the final say.
When Ellen Datlow and I edit anthologies, by contrast, it's a far less invisible role. Whether it's a story, essay, or poetry anthology, the anthology editor's job is to set the book's theme, its parameters, to decide what the shape and tone of it will be, and it's generally after these things are decided that doors are thrown open and the writers invited in. This time, it's the editor's book, and he or she has final say over what goes inside. (Even so, the book can only be as good as its contents. The writers are still the true stars. )
For years I've been muttering about giving up editing altogether, because it cuts into the already-limited time I have for writing myself. But then either Ellen or I will come up with another anthology idea...and soon I'm in thick of it again. There are several things I like about editing that will no doubt prevent me from ever quite giving it up: the opportunity to mentor promising new writers, the opportunity to promote the kind of fiction I love best (mythic fiction and fairy tale literature), and the opportunity to help keep the short story form alive at a time when market forces work against it. Plus, I learn so much from editing -- which has shown me the wide variety of ways one can approach the creative process. It's been a privilege to work with so many fine writers and artists across the North America and the U.K., each of whom addresses the "matter of the fantastic" in his or her own individual way.
I'd been planning, at this point, to follow on with a little essay about the history and the art of editing (which does indeed have zen-like qualities) . . . but then I realized that there was little I could add to these excellent articles on the subject:
First, "Let Us Now Praise Editors" by Gary Kimaya, published the July 24, 2007 issue of Salon Magazine. Quoted on the previous page, the entire piece is well worth reading.
Second, "Black Day for the Blue Pencil" by Blake Morrison, published in The Guardian on August 6th, 2007. Morrison looks at the history of editing, at famous author-editor relationships (Maxwell Perkins and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, etc.), and at the editorial profession's contemporary decline.
"When people speak of writer's block," Morrison comments, "they think of the writer stalled over a blank page, or of throwing scrunched-up bits of paper -- false starts -- into a wastebin. But there's another kind of block, which is structural, when you've written tens of thousands of words, but can't figure out which are superfluous and what goes where. Something's wrong, but you don't know what it is, and that can make you pretty desperate...And that's why editors matter, not as butchers and barbers, but because what's wrong with a book can be something the author has repressed all knowledge of, something glaringly obvious which, the moment an editor or other reader identifies it, you think yes, of course, Eureka, and then you go back and fix it. Editing might be a bloody trade. But knives aren't the exclusive property of butchers. Surgeons use them too."
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Art credits: Photograph of TW & ED by John Crowley. Victorian book illustration by H.J. Ford. The final beautiful sketch is by Thomas Canty, who has often created the cover art & design for books Ellen & I edit together.
