New Writers Ask About Editors: What Makes a Good Editor?

Besides the basics of craft—grasp of the language, sentence structure, grammar et cetera, and appreciation of specific genre tropes and terminology—there are a few other factors I think combine with these to make an editor who can help a writer do their best work. I arrived at these factors in part by working with an editor who lacked them. 

The editor my ghostwriting client hired didn’t do well with the basics. Obviously, the most foundational issue was his weakness in the fundamental tools of the craft. But he also had issues with the creative side of writing. I realized, as I went through his notes, that his approach to reading fiction set him at a disadvantage. Here’s what I mean…

Reading Like a Reader

Obviously, you want an editor who reads your manuscript carefully enough to capture the content. In other words, someone who reads like a reader of this genre, who’s looking for clues as to what’s going on, picking up on character development, listening to what the characters are saying to each other, and assimilates the world-building elements of the story. This happens most readily if your editor enjoys reading the genre you write. 

This editor neither read nor knew much about fantasy fiction and the language of the genre was outside his reading experience. In fact, he didn’t read much fiction at all. Possibly that contributed to his missing key elements of the plot. Conversely, he made note of several things he was certain we’d described in the story that were not actually on the page. 

To illustrate the first case, there were several scenes in which the antagonist of our tale, a power hungry Mage, is shown experimenting with a magical device. The editor missed all but the last of these and commented that the device appears in only one scene before the Mage employs it against Our Heroic Apprentice. He also confused it with a magical macguffin that the resourceful Apprentice uses to foil the Mage’s attempts to turn him against his Mentor. 

This confusion did not happen because the two objects held the same position in the story or did the same thing in practice. I checked for that similarity the moment my client forwarded me the editor’s notes. The objects were quite different in both respects. I believe it happened because we had given the two items names that the editor had trouble remembering. The names were Amharic, but not difficult—they were two and three syllables—and they were not similar. They were not even as similar as Andúril and Narsil—the names JRR Tolkien, in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, gave to the two versions of the sword that Aragorn and his progenitor, Isildur, bore in their fight against the Dark Lord Sauron. 

That single misunderstanding spawned a number of confused notes from the editor and impacted his understanding of the story’s plot and the characters’ motivations.

In the second case, the editor was certain that the Apprentice’s Mentor mentioned several times that he had been given the magical macguffin. This one I could not begin to explain; the Mentor had not been given the macguffin, nor did he ever mention having been given it. This wasn’t through confusion with the magical device; he wasn’t given that either.

At this point, why the editor missed some elements of the plot and misremembered others was irrelevant. Among all the other red flags, this one was of a brilliance worthy of a championship color guard. How might the client have spotted it earlier in the process or, better yet, before he hired the editor? 

More on that later.

Point of View (POV)

The ideal editor has a strong grasp of character point of view (POV) and understands the perils of “head hopping”. This is when a writer tells you what multiple characters in a scene are thinking and feeling—often while leaving out important information they have that the hero needs, but that the writer doesn’t want the hero (or the reader) to have. It is most problematic if the writer has not been a third-person omniscient narrator otherwise, and it can cause a reader to go over a multi-character dialogue repeatedly, possibly counting lines to determine who’s speaking.

This editor repeatedly recommended adding a paragraph or sentence that was from a non-viewpoint character’s POV to tell the reader what was really up. I tried to point out that, in addition to being jarring to have a secondary character suddenly piping up from the corner like a Greek chorus of one, this would have revealed motivations we did not want the reader to understand at that point in the story and undercut later revelations. 

Plotting 

This, of course, brings up another tool you want your editor to have: a grasp of plotting and pacing. You want an editor who understands that you cannot tell the whole story at once in an expository blizzard. It must unfold organically with timely revelations throughout the tale that lead the reader through it, introducing new ideas, revealing hidden truths, exploding expectations,  surprising them in some ways, confirming their suspicions in others. That sort of plotting, with carefully paced reveals, cataclysms, unexpected events and aha! moments, is what keeps readers reading. And we do want them to keep reading.

Show Me; Don’t Tell Me

I’m gobsmacked that I have to say this out loud, but … you want an editor who understands the difference between showing and telling. This editor didn’t. Showing the reader what a character is feeling rather than telling them is one of the elements of writing that I particularly enjoy because of the challenges it can pose. 

Our editor knew the old wisdom and commented on the need to “show” not “tell” but, his notes in the manuscript repeatedly suggested literally telling the reader what we’d just shown them. My client’s hero—the Apprentice—goes through a change in worldview which we show in a series of experiences that run the gamut between quietly enlightening and harrowing. The editor insisted the reader wouldn’t understand why the Apprentice is now open to his Mentor’s philosophy on magical ethics (which is the entire point of his quest) and needs to “hear” a full explanation from the Apprentice’s lips. 

We were a step away from having our hero complete his epiphany then, in case he’s not sure what his sojourn had taught him say: “Self, let me ‘splain.”

So the question is: How do you determine what your prospective editor knows? Is there a way to glean some of that information before you sign contracts or shake hands? I’d like to cover that in the next episode.

oOo

You can find Maya’s books in the BookViewCafe bookstore.