Everyone needs an editor, including you, and including me
It’s kind of a strange job, being an editor, in that, to people outside of the journalism world, most of what you do, what you’ve done, is relatively invisible. Your byline is absent, the words you toil over are mostly someone else’s. A portfolio that clearly illustrated your worth would have to be filled with the journalistic car crashes you helped writers avoid, the half-cooked narratives that never made their way to print. And if you find writers eager to share that stuff, well… invite me to Narnia, too?
If an editor does her job well, the reader never really even imagines that she’s done a job at all. A strange thing to strive for: being undetectable but invaluable.
I think it’s part of why a lot of writers don’t feel a draw toward editing — it can be a thankless, glory-less job. But most writers — especially good writers — will eagerly proclaim how much they value and appreciate their editors. Every writer has a story about when an editor saved him or her from utter humiliation.
I’m not willing to tell you my worst — it’s the kind of humiliating I can’t bear to type, and that I’ll hold onto like a nagging popcorn kernel in my teeth until my last day, and probably then some. But Sandy Smith of Nashville, Tennessee: You are my shining-armored knight and that is canon.
I’d groan with you about a few whiffs, though, from when, in the wake of many newsroom layoffs, we were often left without an editor looking over online copy. One still makes me laugh as much as twitch: In a story about country singer Tracy Lawrence’s annual Thanksgiving turkey fry, I let “Tracy Jordan” fly in the headline instead. The sewer people stole my skateboard, indeed.
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Over more than a decade working as an editor, I sat on the saving side plenty of times, too, and I hold onto those experiences with pride. A writer framed a feature story entirely around a pair of brothers — who were actually father and son. Readers never saw that version. Another writer, unfamiliar with steampunk, misconstrued a country band’s adoption of it for their invention of it.
Gifted, talented, thorough writers make mistakes — often pretty big ones — just about every time they pick up a laptop or a pen. It’s part of creativity, and part of being human. It’s why there are nets under masterfully practiced trapeze artists. Everyone falls.
My embarrassing mistakes were teachable moments, for me, as all mistakes should be. Nowadays, if I don’t have the luxury of another editor watching my step, I step away from just about every piece of copy I write, for about an hour — enough time to let Editor Me take over for Writer Me, and (usually and ideally) catch mistakes before I push “publish.”
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If I had my choice, I’d always work in tandem with another writer/editor, so we could trade fresh eyes and brains. It’s the freshness, and the distance, that really does it.
When you write something, or create something, you almost… absorb it, or become absorbed by it. You lose yourself in the whole too much to focus in on the individual bits and pieces, and the tissue connecting them. And that’s exactly as it should be. But exactly why an editor — one that wants your voice to be clear, and your work to be as effective as it can be — is so crucial. And why I genuinely love to edit, and be edited.