Why Work With An Editor?
Do I really need an editor?
This is a question I hear a lot. And: to be brutally honest, it’s one I’ve asked myself, too*. Look, I hear you. Hiring an editor costs money and time, both of which may be in short supply. So, I hear you ask, why is hiring an editor important?
This is a subject I could expound upon for a long, long time. But, for the sake of brevity, I’ll cut right to the chase and outline one of the most important reasons you should seriously consider working with an editor.
An editor helps you see the wood for the trees.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that, however talented or hard working a writer might be, there’ll be something they’ll miss in their own reviews of their work. It could be as minor as a dropped comma here and there, or as major as a plot hole in the second act which derails the third. This is for two reasons: firstly, the more familiar we are with the work, the less likely we are to spot mistakes, especially if the nature of the error means it won’t automatically get picked up by software grammar and spelling checks (for example, in the case of incorrect word usage or word omission). Just ask anyone who has checked and triple-checked a job application or homework assignment to discover a glaring error only after they’ve turned it in.
Second: whether you write about the life cycle of insects or the intricacies of family relationships, whether your preferred medium is a poem or a War and Peace-esque tome, you’ll have immersed yourself in the subject and story to write the thing. This is what good writers do: they get up close to their subjects (all the better to observe them carefully, and capture them fully). I always think of Poet Ted Hughes’ advice to children writing poetry:
...imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it.
In my view, this is how we produce our best work. However, there is one downside to becoming so fully immersed in a world of our own making: it can become difficult to veer away from the initial path we have carved through this interior landscape, so fully enmeshed have we become with the narrative and how we have decided it will unfold. The result of this is that if we’re not careful, we become so fixed upon our initial plans or ideas that we struggle to consider alternative events or perspectives which could actually develop the story and characters considerably. Here’s where an editor is invaluable. An editor is a trusted person who supports your work and understands your vision, who understands the goals for the writing: that is, where you want your piece to end up. It is this understanding an editor draws upon to suggest adjustments to your work’s narrative path— or, indeed, to suggest new paths entirely—in order for you to achieve this. A good editor will ask you the questions you need to answer in order to bring your idea to its fullest and most well-realized conclusion. A good editor will steer you towards ideas which may have hereto lurked under the surface of the initial story. A good editor will help you uncover the truest story, the one you need to tell. A good editor helps you get the story on the page closer to the one which lives inside your head.