Book Editor

Every time you rewrite a sentence to make it just a little shorter or a bit more clear, you're editing. Every time you struggle over a word trying to find exactly the right one, or stop to fix punctuation, you're doing the editor's job. And when you throw away the last ten pages because you've wandered off track or thought of a better way to develop a character, you're deep in the heart of editor city. Fact is no writer can be a writer without also being an editor; the two go hand-in-hand. But are you the best editor for your own book?

Editors read a lot of books and are jaded. They become editors because of a penchant toward analysis even in the midst of a story. A good editor can maintain that "outsider" status even while reading material designed to grab the reader's heart and tear it in two. Editors analyze; they objectify, and intellectualize, and the writer who can get an editor to lose himself in the story is a writer on the way up.

As writers, we don't just put words on paper; we create experiences. Writers construct scenes that evoke feelings, and the first person to be affected by these scenes is the writer himself. As we read our stories, we find ourselves caught up in the magic we're creating. It takes objectivity to read our own material and say, “Hmm, that doesn't really work, does it?" When we do that consistently, then we've become editors as well as writers.

The difference between writer and editor has to do with point of view. Writers pour out their feelings, thoughts, beliefs and imaginings on paper, creatively turning the stew of ideas inside their heads into coherent prose. Editors, on the other hand, are readers first. Their job is to read the finished (or not so finished) product of the writer's imagination and critique it. The writer is part of the story no matter how removed he or she tries to be, while the editor is always outside.

Some writers can switch hats as easily as, well, switching hats. But very often, it takes years before writers reach that stage. At the start of our careers we can be fervently attached to our ideas, words, phrases and expressions, as well as whole blocks of narrative and exposition. But the day will come when you can read your material with complete dispassion as if it had been written by someone else, and analyze it as you read it. You'll know you're an editor as well as a writer when you can read something you wrote—which was perfectly clear when you wrote it—and realize that it doesn't make any sense when read by someone else. When you can experience your work from two completely different viewpoints, be in it and out of it at the same time, you'll have become that rare and beautiful entity: a writer who's not afraid to rewrite.

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*Deborah Greenspan is a professional writer and the publisher of Llumina Press. She is the author of several books including Spirals, The Connection, Kids' Day, The Healer, and Mirror Mirror all of which are available at www.llumina.com.