By James McCreet
I’ve been professionally editing and subediting text for almost two decades. Not only fiction, but also magazine articles, academic theses and business writing. The traditional role of an editor has been to polish and correct work written by someone who is, essentially, already a proficient writer but who needs another pair of eyes on their work.
In this traditional model, the writer is usually at least as good a writer as the editor – and possibly better. The editor, however, has different knowledge: a deeper understanding of grammar, more experience of plot structures, a better sense of the market, a set of guidelines required by a particular publisher. The editor tweaks an already effective piece of work into the final product.
The relationship works because the skills are complementary. The editor is not typically a writer and the writer is not an editor (though either theoretically could be. It happens).
What I’m seeing these days is a change in the editor’s role. It seems that a writer now is someone who isn’t, essentially, a proficient writer but wants to be. Nevertheless, they have produced a book. The editor’s role in this model is not to add a final polish but to fix all of the errors: the defective dialogue, the bad description, the incoherent plot, the confused tenses, the fundamental lack of correct punctuation etc.
In short, the editor is not adding the final polish but adding the writing itself. The editor must also be the writer. The person who wrote the manuscript is neither a writer nor an editor.
It’s one way – a collaborative or collective way – to produce a novel, though it puts most of the skill on the editor. It’s a reason why I generally don’t edit novels anymore unless it’s the traditional model. Trying to edit a fundamentally badly-written novel is like trying to unbreak an egg. If someone fundamentally can’t write, I think it makes more sense to learn the skills before producing a novel.
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