An Introduction

I am an edi­tor, a word shep­herd. Employ­ing a mix of instinct and craft, I help writ­ers nudge their work into what they want it to be. I read with an intu­itive sense of how a piece of writ­ing oper­ates. Words strung together either res­onate or fail to res­onate with all the other strung-together words I’ve ever read, and I try to artic­u­late how they all work together. It is not my place, how­ever, to guess a writer’s inten­tion nor to sub­sti­tute my own judg­ment for theirs.

The rela­tion­ship between edi­tor and writer depends on the per­son­al­i­ties of each and the style of edit­ing sought. Some writ­ers need an edi­tor to point out the con­stel­la­tions among the stars and move words into clearer align­ment. Oth­ers need to be shown the vast empti­ness between their words and how to fill it. A lucky few have most of the pieces already in place and don’t know it; these writ­ers just need an edi­tor to show them what they’ve already done. It is a gift when a writer shares his or her words with me before they are intro­duced to the world and I feel a respon­si­bil­ity to ensure those words are the intended ones. My faith as an edi­tor is drawn from the pas­sion each writer brings. The rela­tion­ship is sym­bi­otic. Each party is frag­ile with­out the other. And, as with all trust­ing rela­tion­ships, each party is frag­ile with the other as well.

Edi­tors are often accused of being merely frus­trated writ­ers intent on impos­ing their own ideas on a bet­ter writer’s text, but I have never found that to be true. My job is to bring to life a writer’s ideas, not my own. I sel­dom feel the com­pul­sion to write that seems a con­stant in the lives of ded­i­cated writ­ers. On the rare occa­sions when I have my own words to play with instead of another writer’s, I still pre­fer revi­sion to the ini­tial writ­ing down. As a writer, every word I pin down is a shear­ing away of other pos­si­bil­i­ties. As an edi­tor, a world of pos­si­bil­i­ties awaits within each word I encounter. It would be more con­ve­nient, I sup­pose, to blend the two roles, but I find them mutu­ally exclu­sive; as is no doubt already evi­dent, I am as much in need of an edi­tor as any writer I know.