Why I Edit

In the beginning, editing wasn’t really editing. It was knowing writers, being friends with writers, taking an interest in their work, having them ask for my opinion. The first big project I worked on was a friend’s sci-fi novel — a labor of love he had worked on for years and finally had in prose form. It was full of nuance and layered meaning, subtext within subtext, and he wanted to make sure it was all coming across, coming through palpably. I was honored when he asked for a read. He wanted my opinion because he liked my sensibility with language and story. We worked at the bookstore then, and there were long hours of conversation about our current reads. He felt I was familiar enough with his genre that something in his writing would land, that I could bring something to it.

The first read spawned many process talks about how the novel stood and where he wanted it to go, what facets of his characters he wanted to bring out, what fates they would meet. In those talks, we often focused on words — individual words, as word-obsessed people do — debating the ramifications of this form or that and what choice would best advance his vision. I think it was out of that level of examination, that level of detail, that his desire to have me edit arose. I had never marked up a manuscript before. I set off with a sheaf of papers and a blue pen.

I knew that things that didn’t quite fit — awkward phrasings, extraneous fillers — would jump right out at me, that places where the meaning wasn’t quite clear, where the word choice was slightly off or left room for multiple interpretations, would catch me, stop me. It’s an innate thing for me — I feel language that is out of place. I can’t help but see it, hear it. I know the specificity of words, and I know that small choices — things overlooked by others and things that commonly pass in spoken language — can tank the meaning or direction of a piece of writing, distract readers, leave the wrong impression. It’s all about how to best express what you mean to say, and deeper, foundationally, to know yourself and your ideas thoroughly enough to know how to say them. How many times has a client said, “Oh, I hadn’t even thought of that!” or “I hadn’t noticed!” when I point out some small inconsistency in their language? And how often have the options for replacing that language with something more descriptive, more targeted, more alive and expressive, led to conversations about what they really want to say to begin with?

These subtleties of language are each important windows into meaning — authorial intent, the unique stance of each writer, their ability to say it like no one else can. I have heard from many clients over the years that my attention to detail in their work brought to their own attention ambiguities they didn’t realize were there and missed opportunities to say more clearly, more closely, what they meant to. I remember at first I felt like a fraud getting paid to do this because it came naturally and I hadn’t worked for it, had no credential to prove I knew anything. And at first I didn’t charge. I worked with many friends on their writing before one advanced I could be paid for it, that it was a marketable skill. I know now that it is, because time and again, I see holes and gaps in clients’ work that they either can’t see themselves or see but don’t know how to fix. And I realize this vision is something not everyone has.

Perhaps it’s best I come by it naturally. A felt sense of language — or of anything — often can’t be taught. That sense has always been there for me — a sensitivity to language, the ability to be moved by it and experience a word as a portal to so many questions, so many imaginings. It kept me up nights as a kid. Kept me running back to the sketchbook to draw what I saw in my mind’s eye or to the journal to write down the questions and make note of all the things I wanted to look into and track down by the light of day. And then that felt sense has been honed over years of writing, and more recently by honing others’ writing. Perhaps I haven’t had a formal education in editing per se, but I have read and written a lot, deconstructed and reconstructed so many sentences, paragraphs, trajectories of meaning — mine and others’. I suppose the editing has been honed in practice, which might be the only way to do it.

It has certainly made me a better writer — more fluid, more ready, less labored. In my early twenties, I would sweat and twist over my expression. The subtleties and implications were overwhelming and crowded my mind. I couldn’t put a word down on paper because I was paralyzed by options, afraid to commit to something I would later decide to be untrue, and I hadn’t yet learned to revise. Now, twenty years later, I do not face those blocks. I have learned a great deal about the transience of language, its permeability, its transmutable nature, and the nature of creative expression. Nothing is fixed, anything can be altered, no one is completely satisfied with their final product, so “final” becomes a relative term. And nothing can be done in writing if something is not put down first. If something — anything — is put down, it can be worked, molded, shaped. Sometimes it has to be locked in a closet for twenty years before the author becomes ready to sculpt it, but there it is — moldable.

I know the struggle many of my clients face. Writing is hard. For everybody — even for those who are good at it or who do it all the time. Truly it’s grueling — corralling errant passing thoughts and half-lit understandings, then trying to transmogrify them into an entirely different substance. Turning air and ether into material substance, making thought and emotion concrete with this system of symbols that is inherently more limited and often incapable of encompassing the things we feel. And thus is the work of a writer — how to say what we know. It’s difficult!

Just as we can hone in on our true meaning through repeated passes at our language — iterative revision of our own thoughts — we can also hone in on our meaning through conversation, through discussion with an informed, trusted other. Writing as a social act. There is no book that came to fruition in a vacuum. The other, the reader, the recipient, is a critical part of the written word. Words must land somewhere, and how they land can shape their creation if there is a sounding board along the way. I like being both — the generator and the sounding board — and I understand something about both processes.

I’m not sure if I can say why I edit. I do it because I always have. I do it because I correct misspellings — on signs, in print — in my own head. I do it because I like fixing things and making them just so. Bringing things into order, smoothing out hitches and wrinkles and quandaries. It makes me feel like things are right in the world. It’s an urge to put things in right order — to clean and sharpen and clarify and make the language the best form of itself it can be. I keep my physical space organized and it arises from the same place. It’s an urge toward order and unity in the midst of the chaos and entropy of life. Order that is fleeting, perhaps, insignificant, perhaps, but meaningful to individual writers. I’m incredibly distracted by things out of place — as a child keeping items on my desk at right angles to one another and closing the cupboards and drawers before I could fall asleep at night, and now taking care of all those extraneous words and audible clashes of language, and pointing out those gaps that beckon questions the writer really doesn’t want to trouble the reader with. I could have taken this urge to order out on something else, perhaps — become a scientist filling and stacking test tubes in a lab — but for me it has always been about language.

I have also learned a great deal about the arbitrariness and changeability of language. It is not a fixed entity, not defined by right and wrong. Language is constantly changing, constantly evolving and morphing, through time and from group to group. One person’s English is not necessarily another’s, and there are many varieties of English I am not fluent in. Before I understood this, editing was easy, because I thought there was a right way and a wrong way to state anything, and I thought I knew what that was. Now I understand that language is an unruly living entity, that it is always written by somebody and for somebody, and that no right and wrong exist. It is more a question of have you said what you want to say, and will the people you want to reach hear you? Is your language conveying you accurately, or is it getting in the way? This is my role as an editor — to help the writer find their voice and to amplify their voice, not to impose my own or my own sense of language onto theirs.

It’s easier when working with style or submission guidelines — those organizations and institutions that take on the chaos of language and say, “When you’re writing for us, we like it like this. This is how it will be written.” Takes some of the questions out of the vast and tilting field of the written word, and sometimes simply ensuring compliance to a standard is a relief — known, straightforward, accomplishable. Recharges me to dive back into the realm of pure language, where questions can’t be authoritatively answered, and everything is subjective and volitional, and strangely there are no neat endings but sometimes we can create one all the same. I do this because I am familiar with wading in these waters — both the banal and the unknowable deeps — and I see that writers often appreciate a hand while they make their own entry.

© 2024 Carrin Rich. All rights reserved.