Identifying a good editor is about chair placement

Posted on by Chris The Story Reading Ape

My New York Blog Partner Susan Uttendorfsky is one of the Good Editors 😀

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rchazzchute's avatarC h a z z W r i t e s . c o m

I’ve worked with several editors over the years. Mostly, the experience has been good. If you work with enough people though, you get a horror story. The bad editors have one thing in common: they think it’s about them and they bleed self-importance. (Beware: at the editing stage, it’s not generally about the author, either. It’s about the reader.)

Bad editors are: 

1. Belittling, condescending and even angry.

Let’s face it, for some people, editing is a power thing. They love to tell people what to do and where they are wrong because it feels great to be right. Editors like this don’t have a lot of authors who return to the whipping room for another go, however. Life’s too short. If you’re looking for a fight, there are better ways to use that energy.

One person tried to be abusive with me once and their lure was a very low fee. “Wow!…

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12 thoughts on “Identifying a good editor is about chair placement”

  1. Hey, Chris. I just wanted to tell you that you don’t often get the credit you deserve when you reblog posts, because people (me included) click over to read the original and often don’t come back here to even thank you with a “Like.”

    Today I just wanted to say “thanks” for being the bridge to those posts.

    I hope you continue doing what you are doing, knowing that, even when you don’t get recognized, you are recognized “invisibly” by many (me included). 🙂

    Have a great day!

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  3. I’m fortunate to have a good editor. We don’t always agree, but she’s very experienced and I take that into account even though she tells me it’s my decision to go with a suggestion or not. 🙂 I think that’s the key. You need to have a good relationship with your editor one that involves listening to each other and looking at things in different ways or trying different things to see how it looks or hear how it sounds. There’s a lot of work in editing and it’s a joint effort or should be.

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    • Thank you Kev. I saw this post a while back and meant to comment but I think I was otherwise engaged. So it was a bit of a surprise to get around to commenting and read your kind remarks.

      Like you, I was actually going to say that it is – should be – very much a joint relationship, people need to be clear about what is expected on all sides (ie sometimes it’s not just 1:1) so there aren’t any major spats down the line.

      I pretty much agreed with what the article said, (unlike me, ok I carped at a couple of points) but I’m surprised at the horror stories. Rewriting a book in my style isn’t the job of an editor – unless someone comes wanting help with plot, pace, style etc. but that’s very different to editing a finished MS.

      There is a lot of flexibility in editing. If it makes sense, is grammatically correct, spelling is fine, why change it? Sounds trivial, but I wouldn’t change the spelling of words with alternate versions for the one I prefer, eg no one or no-one.

      What I don’t remember reading in the article was anything about factual accuracy. It’s probably my newspaper background, but I think that is a key editorial function too, and in discussion with publishers they look for that in freelance editors as well.

      But like many things, sometimes it’s all the luck of the draw. Harder for newer authors to find an affordable good editor if they don’t know what they are looking for. That’s why blog posts explaining what editors *should* do are so helpful.

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