Editors

It’s one month to the official launch of The Dark Lord’s Daughter, and I’m twitchier than usual. The official launch party is at the Red Balloon Bookstore in St. Paul on Tuesday September 5. If you’re going to be in the Twin Cities, check their events page—they don’t have a huge amount of space, so they’re asking people to register for tickets if they’re going to attend. I’m going to have to go shopping before then—I checked my closet yesterday, and all I have in it right now are pandemic clothes. (Obviously, I haven’t gotten out very often lately.)

The ramp-up to the book launch has sparked a number of interesting conversations with people, one of which led to the topic for this blog post. Namely, editors.

“Editor,” like “writer,” is a job of many hats. Even at large publishing houses, editors are gatekeepers, critiquers, author-publisher liaisons, and project managers. At small presses, they do even more—publicity, layout, book design, everything right down to the nitty-gritty aspects of production and distribution. Even free-lance editors sometimes do more than basic critique, line- and copy-editing, depending largely on what they and the author are okay with. It’s a thankless, undervalued, overworked job that authors frequently misunderstand.

Case in point: back in the Jurassic Age, when I was getting started, there were a lot of stories about editors floating around. Before I sold, I mostly heard the ones about editorial quirks—this one hates anything fantastical, that one wants super-conservative story lines, no one at Publisher X will buy anything that’s more than 70,000 words and you’re better off if it’s 65,000 words or less. The one thing they all had in common was the conviction that Editors Only Care About What Sells. It was very discouraging, because I had no idea What Sells, and even if someone had told me, I wouldn’t have known how to make the story I was telling fit into that particular box.

The one saving grace was that, when people did start trying to explain What Sells, they all contradicted each other. So I shrugged, put my head down, and kept sending my manuscript out, until it became What Sells (To An Editor, Anyway).

At that point, the stories changed, from Editors Won’t Buy Your Story (Because They Only Care About What Sells) to Editors are Ghouls and Cannibals Who Want To Do Unspeakable Things To Your Work (Because They Only Care About What Sells). These were mostly tales about the Totally Unreasonable Changes™ that editors always asked for. More experienced authors assured me that this was inevitable, and advised me to fight tooth and nail to prevent the Evil Editor from changing my deathless prose.

I didn’t take this terribly seriously, either, because by the time I had an actual editor, I was more than halfway through writing my second novel, and I could tell that my current deathless prose was a lot better than the deathless prose in my first novel. I was very nervous about the editorial process, but I couldn’t help thinking that some things really ought to change. I was hoping my editor would have at least some good suggestions.

She had a lot more than some good suggestions. The warnings I’d gotten gave me the courage to argue and suggest alternatives when I really didn’t like the direction the editor was taking, but one of the things I learned from all that was this: When an editor suggests that a scene needs a change that is totally unacceptable to the writer, it is most often because they can see an actual problem and this is the first “fix” they came up with. So the first thing to do is ask, “Why do you want me to add/delete this?”

If the editor says “Because the scene needs more tension,” then the author can respond, “OK, I can do that without doing the exact thing you suggested; give me a few days and I’ll send you something else that will work much better in this context.” (Editors seldom react negatively to a promise to make things better.) If the editor’s response is “I just want my favorite political party to win the argument the characters are having,” then the author knows enough to say firmly, “No, that wouldn’t be true to the characters. I’m not changing that.”

What one does not want to do is reject all of the editor’s suggestions out of hand “because they only want me to cut that/add this in order to make it more commercial.” Editors went into their horrible, overworked, under-appreciated jobs because they love books as much as writers do. Their suggestions are aimed at making the manuscript a better story, even when their suggestions seem totally off-the-wall. Editors are not the enemy.

The second extremely useful thing I learned early on: Never, ever, ever respond to a revisions letter the day you get it. Wait at least a day, better yet, two or three. If you know you have a terrible temper, maybe a week. I’ve had my share of revisions letters that, on first reading, inspired me with an insane, this-editor-is-an-imbecile fury. Answering the editor’s letter while in that state of mind is a good way to destroy any possibility of a working relationship, at best. At worst, the editor will not only never buy another one of the writer’s books, they will also, when asked, tell other editors that they found that writer “too difficult to work with to be worth the time.”

I have never received a revisions letter that, once I calmed down from the aforementioned insane fury, wasn’t mostly reasonable…and the “unreasonable” change requests have always turned out to be a) the result of a very real problem (once I got the editor to explain why they wanted it), or b) the result of the editor missing a clue or a statement that I’d put in the book that covered the “problem”…which meant that what I needed to do was punch up the overlooked bit so that nobody else would miss it. Fixing the problem or punching up the overlooked bit makes the story work better.

I don’t think I have ever rewritten everything my editors have asked for, the way they have suggested. But I’ve changed a lot of things I didn’t expect to, and I’ve almost never regretted doing so.