Author and editor Toni Morrison once described her ideal editor as “cool, dispassionate,” a person who can approach any given manuscript with an objective mind independent of taste, sensibility, and style.
If one were to work in literary publishing long enough, as I have for nearly fifteen years—whether at a publishing company or independently, editing hundreds of essays, short stories, and poems, and editing over 50 books published to market—one will hear different ideas about what an editor is, what an editor should do, and what value, if any, an editor can bring to the author.
Every written work needs to be edited, and an editor should work to improve the manuscript according to the author’s voice and intention. A good editor knows that a manuscript can teach him something he did not know about the editorial process; the best editor works with humility and expertise toward the best version of the manuscript and will not impose what he thinks is “right.”
The author knows, even instinctively, what to do with the manuscript, and a good editor knows this. But often to the author, it feels impossible to get the manuscript where one knows it should be; it can feel overwhelming.
So the question for the editor is: How can we work together to make the impossible possible?
This is where we will begin, here at Regular Genius.
