So, You Want to Be an Editor?
Remember These 5 Things
As an editor, it is important to pay it forward to the younger generations when you have the opportunity. Publishing is a small, clandestine business in the grand scheme of things, and there are many bright-eyed, completely lost young people trying to get into it every year (I was one of them), without a concrete understanding of how to get into the business or what an editorial assistant actually does when they get there. From time to time, I’m asked to talk with students or people looking to make a career switch. I had the experience recently of speaking with an intern and feeling like a firehose of information. Hopefully they got something out of it, but I walked away having the distinct feeling I might have just talked at them. In hopes of not having a repeat performance in a couple of weeks when I speak with another group of students hoping to become editors, I thought I would organize my thoughts here as a bit of a dry run. Here we go:
So, You Want to Be an Editor?
Most people who want to get into publishing want to be editors. Being an editor is a Culturally Desirable Profession. Like other professions that feature prominently in romantic comedies (architect — it takes 7-11 years to become one — and journalists —somehow even lower pay, longer hours, and a higher chance of getting laid off than in book publishing), Cultural Desirability is directly correlated with the amount of un-glamorous work it takes to be successful in that profession. But if you are not discouraged — and you rarely ever are before you actually do the Culturally Desirable Profession — then here are the five best pieces of advice to remember as you try to become an editor.
1. Read Contemporary Literature — Work in the Now
This is especially important for English majors who are coming off of years of education in classic literature. Editing and publishing are not about theory, it’s about practice. Learn to analyze in the here and now, don’t read with the historical weight and the responsibility of “Literature” on your shoulders.
When your boss asks you what you think of something you’ve read for them, they are not asking for the equivalent of a thesis on Henry James. Reading and loving contemporary literature often means starting with base, gut level questions: Is this story compelling? Is it well written? Would people like to read this? Who are those readers? Forget symbolism, literary devices, and theme. Does it work? Do you like reading it and why or why not?
Most of us are taught in school that literature is comprised of the great works that have been canonized over a couple of centuries. If you want to become an editor, untrain yourself from this way of looking literature. Start by reading as many contemporary books as you can, books published in the last three years, and create a new baseline for yourself of what people are reading here and now, not in high school or to get an English master’s degree. I still read Edith Wharton and Nabokov on vacation, but these are aspirations and ideals to live up to, not lessons to implement as you wade into the messier, imperfect world of contemporary literature. An editor’s job is not to meet the standards of classic literature, but to publish good books, books that could be someone’s favorite book now.
2. Talk to People About What They Read — Listen
This is a profession about not only finding good books and making them better, but getting other people to read. Learn the reading taste of others even if it’s drastically different from your own. Talk to people who read, especially the people who are not in publishing. Figure out why “regular” readers like a book you hate, why a book that changed your life they found dull. Don’t be judgmental. Literature is subjective. People are unique. Listen to readers of all stripes so that as an editor you can locate the people who you are trying to edit books for, even and especially if they aren’t exactly like you in every way.
3. Improve Your Tools – Pay Attention
Once you start to grasp what’s good and why, and what people read and why, you can start thinking about the job of editing. There are a million-and-one approaches to editing that can be effective. There are not many how-to books on how to edit that detail these with any specificity. Publishing is often called an apprenticeship profession because you learn best by watching others do it. Pay attention to how editors work and how effective their methods are in different situations — how a suggestion was made, if it produces a stronger revised work.
If anyone tells you there’s a set way to sit down and do an edit in a perfect, systematic way, don’t trust them. Steal like an editor and gather your tools from everyone and everywhere you can. This information isn’t in a handbook, so the most critical thing to remember is to pay attention. And since your job is improving writers, you can also look to the numerous books on writing craft, like Stephen King’s On Writing, Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, Mary Karr’s The Art of the Memoir. The job is all figuring out how to make writing more effective and listening to how great writers break down how to write effectively will help guide the way.
4. Help Writers Achieve Their Artistic Vision — Service
While there is an infinite number of tools to learn, they all should be in service of what I believe is the editor’s version of the Hippocratic Oath: you’re there to help the writer achieve their artistic vision. You’re not there to pad your own ego, to take credit, or to re-write books with your own preferences in mind. All of your editorial tools are in service of trying to understand the writer, their intentions, and their temperament, and to use this knowledge of them to make their book a better version of what they intended it to be. You have to figure out the effect the author wants (sadness, thrills, laughter, etc.), what they are trying to achieve, before you can help them better achieve that.
5. Editing is a Lifestyle Not a Job
Finally, I must come back to the idea that being an editor is a Culturally Desirable Profession. As my wife, who also works in publishing, is often fond of saying, professions like these are lifestyles, not jobs. Having such a large stake in the work you do, being part of the creative process and producing such a tangible product is a rare and valuable thing that most fields simply don’t offer. But the tradeoff is that you can never expect being an editor or even an editorial assistant to be a 9-5 job. Reading and editing takes a lot of time — that’s your nights, your mornings, your weekends, your vacations. If you still want to be an editor, be prepared for the un-glamorous work and a long grind. If you become an editorial assistant, remember to check in with yourself and make sure this unending grind is worth the intermittent, rewarding parts of the job (seeing a manuscript transformed, discovering an exciting new writer, hearing other people talk about and love a book you helped bring into existence).
Don’t keep chasing the mirage built by Jude Law at his peak handsomeness and charm in The Holiday or Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds in the The Proposal—if the grueling hours of the editorial world ever starts to dim your love of books. There are lots of other jobs in publishing that let you work with books and authors that take over less of your life. I hope regardless of where you end up, as an editor, as a writer, in publishing, or doing something else entirely, that you continue to engage with the here and now of books.
YES!!!!