Why Editors Need to be Writers

I get the impression that editors are sometimes viewed the way teachers are: if you can’t do, you teach. If you can’t write, you edit. And that, in both cases, is a disappointing perspective. I am not an editor because I’m not a good enough writer. I’m an editor because my talent lies in seeing strengths and weaknesses in another writer’s work.

I do, however, write because I enjoy it. But I also write because I think it’s an important exercise to keep in shape for my writers. Editors are more like coaches than teachers. They should be able to do some of what their writers do, but their helpfulness as a guide does not wane in the waxing light of the talent they’re molding.

Editors should be writers as well because they need to know – and be reminded of – what it feels like to:

• Write the perfect sentence going down the highway at 70 mph and subsequently risk life and limb to find paper and pen in the glove box to get it down.

• Spend your day writing mediocre copy that’s never acknowledged one way or the other then come home to a blank page you can’t fill because your writing soul was slowly sucked away at work.

• Be fascinated by people’s quirks or turns of phrases because you’ll work them into a story or even build whole characters around those foibles.

• Be rejected by dozens of strangers without comment.

• Explain to people why you keep hand-written journals and notes instead of using a computer for everything.

• Encounter things in the real world and automatically think about how your fictional characters would respond.

These are just some of the experiences that make editors relate, and therefore communicate, better with their prose-penning counterparts. The relationship ought to be a partnership, and editorial empathy allows it to be.

I think part of the reason editors across the publishing spectrum have a reputation for imposing, obnoxious egos is they forget the experiences of writers – the struggles, the small successes, the self-doubt, the writing walls that leave you on your rhetorical ass for days.

Editors work in the realm of exercising judgment. But to execute that judgment with respect and significance means much more than ripping a manuscript to shreds as you mock it. Your own bleeding page, left all but dead by the pen of another, is just the thing to cut that ego down.

Giving Away Free Content Pays

William Shakespeare did it. Anais Nin too. Writers need to eat, and that means we write for money. We tailor our art so at the end of the day we have a roof over our head, clothes on our back, and food in our stomach. Maybe Virginia Woolf said it best: "Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money."

Feels a little dirty though, huh? Like we’re all writing whores.

There are dozens of debates to be had about exchanging prose for pay, but what about the concept of giving it away for free?

My friends over at KGaps Consulting are doing just that with their new book Hub Mentality. You can buy it on Amazon.com for $14.95, or you can download a digital copy for free on their website.

The 100-page book covers advertising models that work and how to successfully implement them in a business. It’s the core of what they do as a consulting company. And it’s not the only book they’re giving away free of charge – there are seven others available on their site.

So if they’re giving away all this free content, how are they making a living at the end of the day? Aren’t they giving away their value?

Greenleaf Book Group, an independent publisher here in Austin, addresses the debate on free content in their Big Bad Book Blog.

In their post “On Piracy, Ebooks, and Giving Away Your Book for Free”, author Neil Gaiman explains that when he made his poetry and fiction free, his fan following dramatically increased:

Places I was being pirated…I was selling more and more books. People were discovering me through being pirated, and then they were going out and buying the real books.

He persuaded his publisher to put out one of his books, New York Times bestseller American Gods, for free online for a month. Sales tripled.

By polling his audiences on book tours, Gaiman found that most people discovered their favorite authors through a book being lent to them rather than walking into a bookstore to buy a book from an unfamiliar author:

They were lent it; they were given it; they did not pay for it. And that’s how they found their favorite author, and I thought you know, that’s really all this is. It’s people lending books, and you can’t look at that as a lost sale. Nobody who would’ve bought your book is not buying it because they can find it for free. What’s you’re actually doing is advertising. You’re reaching more people. You’re raising awareness.

If you don’t care about making money from your writing, what’s the downside to offering it up for free?

If you do care about making money from your writing, giving it away for free – in a structured way – could be the best investment you make towards sales.

Why Two Writing Heads are Better Than One

With the death of a child, many parents don’t end up staying together long after. Why? Shouldn’t such a monumentally difficult experience draw people closer together? Not necessarily.When both people are going through the grief process concurrently, they have little energy to offer their partner. This isn’t the case in every heart-breaking challenge, but sometimes it is.

With a piece of literature, a certain amount of space helps prevent this kind of support gap. By working independently and not necessarily on the same portions, a writer will hit problems at a different time than the editor will, and that distance can produce excellent feedback.

For instance, in The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary, author Simon Winchester explains that when editors went back in for a revised edition with the Oxford English Dictionary, they didn’t start with A. They started with M.

The explanation is simple: the original editor, James Murray, was just starting out with the project when the first few letters were published. While by no means are these original entries inherently inferior to most readers, they were a sort of warm-up for the best to come.

And so editors of the second edition acknowledged Murray’s strengths and their beginner’s weaknesses by starting with the sections where Murray had hit his editorial stride.

While I wouldn’t suggest working on a novel in this manner, for obvious reasons of pure confusion, the underlying theory remains applicable to the fiction writer-editor relationship.

For example, let’s say the editor is finishing off the last section of a first draft while the writer is tackling a rewrite of the first part of that draft for round two.

The editor is, necessarily, behind the writer. The author doesn’t wait for the editor’s feedback before foraging ahead and the editor works as the writer produces.

The writer is facing issues in what is likely the weakest part of his writing while the editor has already provided feedback on those parts and is now critiquing stronger writing.

They’re not trying to tackle the same problems at the same time.

Additionally, the problems in the early manuscript aren’t likely to be the same (or as problematic) as later writing when the author hits her groove. The editor can see some of the strengths that have emerged while the author might feel overwhelmed by the challenge of getting a grip on a wily early draft.

It’s a useful balance of perspective, both for morale and for solving the problems, and each partner in the process contributes something different.

For instance, the writer might have his mind deep in the character building in the beginning of the novel, while the editor hasn’t given it a thought lately. The distance the editor has from the immediate issue the writer sees can, and often does, provide the ability to see solutions more clearly.

Novels are not written by one person. Behind good novels are good editors, I believe, regardless of the fact that it’s the writer’s name that becomes memorable while the editor’s is simply a credit inside or maybe in the acknowledgments the typical reader might skim at best.

But to me, this give and take, back and forth relationship is like raising a child. Each person puts forward their best contributions, hoping the kid will come out better than the two individuals that made her.