Meet your editor
As an editor, my job is to help you to transform your manuscript into the very best it can be.
People often assume that, as an editor, I correct spellings and punctuation. Sure, I do that. But I do a whole lot more besides. No matter what type of manuscript I am editing, my role is to improve my client’s chances of publishing and selling their manuscript. That role is based on developing a relationship with the client. Some of my editor-client relationships last years, over one or multiple manuscripts, while others last no more than a week and one short journal article. No matter the length of the relationship, much of it is based, fittingly, on the written word.
When my daughters were babies, I worked part-time as a sociology tutor for The Open University, a wonderful UK institution that has been providing distance learning to traditional and non-traditional students since 1969. My main means of communication with my students was via the essays they wrote and the comments I manually wrote on those essays. Every few weeks, I received an envelope full of essays to mark, grade, and comment on. With help from my OU mentor, I learned how to write clear and detailed comments that helped the students to figure out what they didn’t know, learn more about the topic, and improve their study, research, and writing skills.
I took what I learned as an OU tutor into my subsequent geography lectureship, and then into my work as a professional editor. My approach to engaging with university students through writing was a source of both joy and frustration. It was a joy to see students taking my written and tutorial advice to heart and to see improvements in their subsequent written assignments. My suggestions might relate to their use of language, their grammar, the structure of their essay, their approach to the research, or their referencing. How satisfying! However, I was frustrated by those students who completely ignored my written comments and were only interested in the grade I awarded them. They were not interested in using my accompanying comments to improve and achieve a better grade in their next assignment.
My work as an editor follows a very similar pattern, though, happily, the frustrating clients are few and far between. I edit all sorts of manuscripts – academic journal articles, institutional reports, PhD dissertations, non-fiction travel, nature, memoirs, self-help, education, and, of course, fiction. No matter what type of editing, my work always includes a copy edit as my first read through. I want to see how I can make the writing zing, how I can play around with sentences, paragraphs, or bigger scales of writing to make the manuscript, in its current form, the best it can be, while, critically, not losing the client’s voice. And that’s all some clients want – a copy edit and no more.
But most clients request a developmental or structural edit and that’s the next step in my editing process. I get a lot of joy doing that type of work because I’m helping clients to develop their ideas, to fill in gaps in their narrative, to expose and address inconsistencies in chronology or context, and so on. That deeper relationship with the client’s work is very exciting and rewarding. I grin from ear to ear when a client sends me their revised manuscript for a further round of editing and I can clearly see that they’ve taken my advice to heart. They may not have resolved a problem according to my suggestion, but they’ve acknowledged that a problem exists and have found their own way to address it.
Very occasionally, however, I will have a client who, despite having requested and paid for a developmental edit, is like those students who were only interested in the grade I awarded them. They take my copy edit and ignore the copious margin comments and the accompanying pages of advice that I’ve painstakingly written (that they’ve paid me to painstakingly write). The copy edit reads better; so, it must be better, right? Sure, it reads better, but problems persist with context, chronology, inconsistency, explanation, and who knows what else, that only the client – i.e., the expert on this topic – can rectify. Academic clients who submit such manuscripts to academic journals are often surprised to meet with rejection or a requirement that major revisions be undertaken. Invariably, the reason for rejection or the required revisions matches precisely the advice I have given but the client has chosen to ignore.
My job, in other words, is to highlight problems and support the writer in finding ways to overcome those problems. But the client then must put in the work in the next draft, based on my recommendations. I don’t do the work for the client; they have to do it for themselves. I only advise and recommend. Thankfully for me, and for them, most put in that work.
My advice: Use your editor. Listen to your editor. If your editor says your manuscript lacks structure or that certain characters are doing nothing to move the story along, or your story doesn’t create a sense of place or time, or the chronology doesn’t work, listen to what your editor says. Their only vested interest in your manuscript is in helping you to transform it into the absolute best that it can be.
What I’m working on this week
I check in once a week by Zoom as accountability buddy to one of my clients. Our meetings always feel constructive and the subsequent drafts of her manuscript reflect our conversations as her writing gets closer to where she wants it to be. Last week’s check in felt different. We chatted for almost two hours – twice as long a usual – and it felt, to both of us, that she crossed an emotional threshold, as she delved into certain aspects of her life and how they impact her written work. It felt like a breakthrough for her and I’m very excited to see what direction her writing goes next.
With temperatures in the high 30°Cs, I’m trying to find ways to keep cool while I work. An electric fan behind me and a freezer-bag ice block wrapped in a towel at my back are keeping me just about cool enough to stay focused on my work. I had two midweek deadlines last week, both academic manuscripts and both related to inequities and disparities between different groups of people – one focused on cancer treatments and the other on renewable energy. The studies focused on very different groups of people in very different parts of the world, written by scholars who are unlikely to ever encounter each other’s work; yet I was struck by the similarities in the human cost of social inequality and inequity and the sometimes unexpected intersections of ethnicity, indigeneity, and gender with socio-economic and health disparities.
Photo by Jessica Lewis 🦋 thepaintedsquare on Unsplash