Editing

Last week, I told someone whose book I was editing that it needed a whole lot of reworking. She replied, “Ya la, my writer did such a bad job. Since you’re editing it, can you rewrite the bad parts?”

Today someone asked me how much I charge for editing. When I told him, he said, “Wah! So expensive just to check for typos ah?”

Editing is so misunderstood that if it was a person, it would constantly be on Prozac. Why oh why do people think that editing a book is like reading a bedtime story? I have great admiration for editors because I know how difficult it is to be one. Last year I worked as a freelance sub-editor for a women’s magazine. They finally found a full-time sub-editor after three months and I gratefully relinquished my duties. It’s a tough job made even more gruelling when the story is boring beyond belief. And putting myself through that is breaking my golden rule. I try my best not to read anything that bores me. Life is too short.

Editors are terribly underrated and underpaid and almost never acknowledged. They’re the faceless sculptors behind every great story. The people who see a story for what it really is, not what the writer wants it to be. Theirs’ is the invisible hands that guide a writer up the bestseller list.

Stephen King pays tribute to his editor in his book 'On Writing'. In his third foreword he says:

“One rule of the road not directly stated elsewhere in this book: ‘The editor is always right.’ The corollary is that no writer will take all of his or her editor’s advice; for all have sinned and fallen short of editorial perfection. Put another way, to write is human, to edit is divine.”