ARE YOU A WRITER, AN EDITOR, OR BOTH?

By El Ochiis

It’s my humble opinion that behind great pieces of writing, is an even greater editor.  No, Tolstoy, I don’t believe your spouse, Sophia Tolstoy, was just the co-progenitor of fourteen offspring; she copied and rewrote your work – yeah, Sophia polished Anna Karenina and War and Peace, making it possible for you to write the best novels that you could.  

Edmund Malone, not only edited Shakespeare’s works, but, was credited for making James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson entertaining.  It was novelist, Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s astute advice to Charles Dickens, about Great Expectations, that encouraged Dickens to change that final, yet wonderfully ambiguous line, in which Pip sees “no shadow of another parting from her” – in lieu of just a finality wherein Pip and Estella didn’t get together.

TS Eliot was asked whether editors weren’t just failed writers, Eliot replied: “Perhaps, but so are most writers.”  This was a facetiously charming response coming from a man whose famous poem, The Waste Land, was edited by Ezra Pound, who, himself, edited other poets and novelists as part of his job at Farber and Farber.

How does a new writer get his or her manuscript in front of a ‘Pound or Malone’?  Or, when does he/she decide the editorial route? Well, first, you must decide what kind of editor you want; or, which kind you desire to become: developmental; structural; line?

As a writer, you’d want a professional editor who would be as much a psychologist as a prose technician – a sports coach who would get you in the right frame of mind for the race.

As a storyteller with compelling messages to share, I want a seasoned mastermind to brilliantly bring to life, the emerging aesthetics of my story – one whose life goal is to find the next James Baldwin or Leo Tolstoy – yes, I dream big, when not self-deprecating.  You see, writing can be tantamount to giving a chunk of sugar to a raccoon – with its odd fastidiousness, the raccoon will wash the sugar in the water until there’s nothing left – an editor would definitely help with that.

The repetitious advice is to read the jacket of published writers in your genre and see who edited the novel and contact him/her.  My suggestion would be to do what I do when I need a good accountant, I go to the professional organization published by the IRS; There’s one for editors, the Editorial Freelancers Association.   Yes, it’s hard, but it’s my observation that if you can complete a great, or an anomalous, novel, finding the right editor should be the easy part.  Or, maybe your propensity is more editorial:  Do you enjoy developing and shaping content; Can you work with multiple voices; Are you a natural problem solver who’s comfortable delivering constructive feedback?  You could be an exceptional editor who becomes a profound scribe - the next Toni Morrison - an editor whose work was ‘emended’ by one of the most acclaimed editors, Gottlieb - Or, Sophia Tolstoy, sans the fourteen childbirths.