This is a follow-on from a blog post I wrote way back in August of 2018. I still get emails about it, asking to write a little more on the subject. Well, you asked for it, so here it is. Fill your boots, as they say.
I know. It’s like giving your child away to another person. Probably someone you hardly know. Are they going to take care of her? Treat her right? Let her become all that she could be? Or will she just be abandoned, and left to linger with a load of other kids in squalour?
Okay, that got dark very quickly. Let’s back it up a little. And deploy fewer metaphors.
When you’re writing a book, it’s a wonderfully selfish pursuit. Assuming you’re writing it on your own in the first place of course. It’s just you and the text. It’s your baby (ah, there goes that hackneyed metaphor again, sorry). This is all you, and no one else.
But let’s take a reality check: You can’t do it all by yourself. You need a second pair of eyes. The best second pair you’re going to come across is an editor.
Editors are experts at understanding what works for audiences. Their whole careers are based on that. They are dedicated to making your book the best it can be. It’s the only thing they care about. But they have an advantage that you don’t: They didn’t write the thing in the first place, and can look at it in a dispassionate way, and therefore will be less afraid to suggest changes that you might not otherwise countenance.
Letting go of full control of your novel is not fun. It never is. It’s so hard to trust someone else with your darling project. But it’s needed. Great books have lived and died by the relationship between an editor and a writer.
I know it’s hard, and yes, sometimes it just doesn’t work out between you and an editor. Maybe you’ve tried, but they just can’t see it the way you can, and you know 100% that you’re right. You might have to look elsewhere, but never decide that you’re going to do it all yourself. I would guess that nine times out of ten, the relationship between a writer and an editor broke down because of a failure on the writer’s part, not the other way around.
A way of avoiding this happening to you once you get the privilege of working with a good editor (and yes, it really is a privilege) it to change your mindset. Once the book has been written, and you have completed your first draft, try and think of the book as something that was written by someone else. Your job now is to work with the editor to make sure that book is perfect.
And once the work between you is done, and it goes out there into the world, guess what? It becomes your baby, all over again.
Andy Jones Online 