You as a writer are thinking about collaborating with an editor. This can be a bit of a scary moment. You may have a draft into which you’ve poured a lot of time, heart, and energy, and the thought of some outsider coming along with a red pen to tear it apart can feel invasive or intimidating. As an editor I’d like to set your mind at ease.
An author’s draft is like a rough sculpture the author has chiseled from a massive block of stone. The author has a vision, and the rough shape of that vision has taken form as the author’s draft. Now the author is ready to take smaller, more specialized chisels and chip away hundreds of tiny flakes of stone to refine the sculpture’s form. The role of the editor is to provide these specialized chisels and to give the author some ideas about how they might be used. Ultimately, it is the author who chooses which chisels to employ and how to refine the work.
Providing an author with a high-quality edit does not entail tearing the author down, scoffing at the author’s ideas, or belittling the work the author has created. The editor should not impose personal beliefs, opinions, values, or stylistic preferences on the author. The editor should simply help the author identify potential ways to showcase and enhance the manuscript’s merit and strengths. A good editor is both thorough and encouraging, and should give the author something concrete, helpful, and empowering to work with. The editor’s work should not make the author feel discouraged or at a loss as to how to proceed with revisions.
All authors, even those who are published and renowned, have blind spots and weaknesses. For example, the published author Michael Chabon, who has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize and many other distinguished awards, reuses certain obscure words multiple times in his magnum opus The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, despite the fact that most writing instructors would recommend using obscure words sparingly and nonrepetitively to avoid distracting or annoying readers. We all know that Michael Chabon is an intelligent man whose creative talents are to be respected, but his published works are not perfect. Michael Chabon, like all writers, has blind spots that only an outsider could help him identify.
As an editor, and as an outsider to your draft and mind, I will help you identify blind spots in your writing, just as I have done for hundreds of other writers, but I will do so constructively and professionally. Having blind spots in no way means that an author’s writing or ideas lack merit. It simply means the author is on the journey from draft to final published work.
Anyone who is serious about writing must be prepared to do a large quantity of revisions between the draft and final publication stages. Making detailed revisions is a necessary process for any author’s draft writing to become publishable. No matter who the writer is, the editor will provide a lot of concrete things for the writer to consider integrating into revisions. If I help you identify specific words you may have repeated quite a few times in your draft, or if I present you with suggestions of usage alternatives for a given word, just keep in mind that I could do the same with Michael Chabon’s published works, and that you could do the same with my writing.
Ogma Editing 