Editor—What’s the Use?
Editor, Schmeditor! “I don’t edit anything I write! It just comes right off my pen—complete. I just don’t need editing.” This declaration by a good friend and aspiring poet just floors me. What is in your mind or memory does not automatically translate onto paper and words. Condensing the universe inside your head is a labor, with achievement something of a miracle. You need to edit. You must edit. Your work is nothing until you have gone through multiple edits.
We edit every minute of the day. When to get up, how to dress. What we order in our coffee, what car we drive to work, how we spent lunchtime and after hours. OK, that sounds like decision making and choices. Precisely! That’s what editing is all about. How to convert idea into something understandable, valuable, readable, memorable.
If you want to be an influencer, read that author, editing must start the moment you put works on paper—even a napkin! Editing must start the moment you the photographer or artist exposes a pixel or dips a brush in paint. Your job is to forge through iterations, perhaps a great many of them, until you have achieved a work that interests, pleases, instructs, and engages your reader/viewer—all this before you engage a professional to review your work.
Obviously there are different kinds of edits. Housekeeping edits make sure the page numbers are sequenced , spelling is corrected, and captions match pictures. Another checks out those pesky commas: more of them in Chicago style, fewer in AP newspaper style. Sometimes the narrative jumps from one scene to the next, without transitions to help the reader to get from place to place or day to day. Grammar and logic are as important as style and voice. Then there is continuity, like in the movies. Remember the Starbucks coffee cup that was inadvertently left in an episode of “Game of Thrones?”
Sounds elementary, but in reviewing a selection of recently independently published books, both with and without imagery, I couldn’t figure out who was talking, where the speakers were, nor the timeline of action. And of course the kicker is: does the premise of the manuscript hold together in clarity of theme or message?