Editing is emotional for a writer.
When editing your work, I have to take a lot into consideration. Let’s face it, who wants someone to pick through your project containing all of your blood, sweat, and tears with a fine-toothed comb and point out everything wrong with it? Nobody!
I’m (usually) the first set of professional eyes to see your writing after you’ve shown your best friend, your mother, your sister, and your book club. People who love you. People who want you to win at life. People who want you to be successful.
Then here I come.
Writers are sensitive, man. I should know, I’m smack dab in the middle of writing a novel myself and when I think about someone other than my husband reading it, my stomach flips like an Olympic gymnast. Look out Dominique Dawes, someone is going to read my story and my belly is somersaulting right past you!
I use that feeling when I edit. It gives me compassion and empathy towards my author. I have to be ferocious, I have to trash talk you and roast you worse than the readers will so you toughen up. I have to push you so all that awful stuff that you hear comes from me first and you can smooth those rough edges. It’s my job to catch your dream as it spirals out of the sky and then give you the tools to launch it back. Pretty magical, isn’t it? Amazon reviewers can be brutal. Goodreads can be hell. Having a good editor will take away their power. (Well, most of it… some people will not be happy no matter how perfect a story is! My advice is to ignore them.)
When you get your edits, it’s instinct to get defensive. Don’t do that. Your editor is on your team! Your editor wants to fight for you to have a good piece of literature to give to the world.
I will tell you that you are wrong. No, that word does NOT have an apostrophe. No, you can’t put semicolons and commas wherever you want. “And by the way, bloaty is not a word. There’s bloated, there’s bloating, but no bloaty.”* Do you even know what a question mark is for?!?!?
It’s not an attack. Editing is not negativity. Editing is landscaping for books. We pull the weeds, we trim the hedges, and we water the flowers. Your job is to shower your creativity on them and encourage them to grow into beautiful works of art to share with the world.
So put pen to paper or fingertips to keyboard, and get your ideas out of your brain and into a book.
By the way, always remember:
Your editor loves you.
Your editor wants you to win at life.
Your editor wants you to be successful.
Warmest Regards,
The Editor
*Quote from Gilmore Girls: One’s Got Class and the Other One Dyes