Who Calls the Shots: Editor or Writer?

Writing, along with filmmaking and a few other media, is a very funny art form because it has an element of collaboration. It seems impossible for any legitimate work of art to be formed by committee, and yet writers really need to work closely with their editors in order to make their work reach its full potential. But what is an editor's real role in pushing a novel or story to fruition? Who's in control? Is it really a fifty-fifty relationship of equal power, or is the writer a lofty monarch with a devoted advisor?

From what I've read of some of the most compelling editor-writer relationships in history, and from what little I've experienced for literary magazines, editors aren't merely devoted word-crunchers for the writer. They have their own agendas, and in fact, to be great editors they've got to have an independent vision and artistic sensibility. A creative writing professor of mine spoke to my class about how editing was itself an art, and that some people were born to be great editors just as some were born to be great writers.

At first I found it hard to believe -- can an art ever be refining and honing someone else's creation rather than creating something yourself? But the more I thought about it, the more I started to believe it. After all, many visual artists create art by using ordinary objects or scenes and making us see them in new ways by bringing them into a different focus.

After the jump: so who's in charge?

There are as many editor-writer relationships as there are editor-writer pairs, of course, but there seem to be a few interesting traits in common in some great editors I've read about. A few editors of great writers when they were just starting out were absolutely fearless. Raymond Carver's editor cut huge swaths of the great short story writer's writing, sometimes demanding entirely new endings that changed the entire message of a story.

Other editors didn't even consult with their writers before making changes that dramatically altered the way a work might be read. This is particularly evident in the nineteenth century, and in countries such as Russia where censorship was always rearing its ugly head. To keep their jobs, editors had to walk a line of balancing art with acceptability. In this way, great works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy were changed forever.

So is the editor king? It seems to me that in a "healthy" writer-editor relationship, an editor needs to take a strong hand, but a writer must always have inviolable veto privileges for any suggestions of the editor. I've seen how a weak editor can hurt a book; the more respected a writer gets, the more delicately and reverently his work will be treated, and writers such as Stephen King and Philip Roth could have used someone who was tiptoeing around them less, I believe.

With regard to your own work, if you get an editor looking at it, be sure to have a strong sense of your story. If you can hang on to that, you'll be able to defend your work and fight off any disastrous changes. At the same time, remember the old proverb about the flexible willow sapling that bends in the storm and survives while the old oak is broken. Be flexible, and be willing to see another person's interpretation of your own work! If you're lucky enough to work with a great editor, your work will reach its true potential in his or her hands.

Comments

[Naomi Hamm]

Of course the kudos go mostly to the writer, as well AS to the muse, but without the editor and the publisher the writer would nowhere, somehow though what it all boils down, is the artisitc, creative side and the more down-to-earth ingenuity of the editor who knows just what to say and what to do and at the write/right time as well, otherwise, we writers who are too personally close to our stories, characters, plots, subplots, etc would be lost in a mire of too much of this and too much of that. Or maybe it could be reprashed and come out sounding much better, a little less dialougue where scene should steal the unecessary dialogue and make it seem more realistic. Action, characterazation, storyline, plot action, theme, pace, timing and a whole lot more goes into the basic novel, be it historical or contemporay.

And yet the author is the true visionary who can and will tell it like it is.

But then can always use the help of a professional and creatively-endowed editors perception. In the long range without both, there is just no ying and yang, in the world of writing.