I Used to Think There Were Good Writers and Bad Writers
“I used to think there were good writers and bad writers.”
I’m on a Zoom call with someone I worked with in the past. She’s telling me what she learned from working with me.
“Tell me what you mean by that,” I say.
“Well, working with you I see that actually the two types of writers are those with a good developmental editor, and those without.”
I laugh.
Yes.
That is true.
“It’s like this little hidden secret nobody knows unless they’re in the industry,” she says.
Yes, it’s that too.
A classic example of this in action is Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird vs Go Set a Watchman. To Kill a Mockingbird is a classic that is read in every high school English curriculum. It’s one of the most beautifully rendered novels of Southern literature, in my opinion.
Don’t come for me, literature majors, but Go Set a Watchman is a hot mess.
Same author. Different outcome.
Rumor has it (on good authority: Ie, a friend of mine who is a professor of American literature and who knew Lee and her family personally) that Lee had an astonishingly good editor for To Kill a Mockingbird. Go Set a Watchman, on the other hand, was published late in her life and with very, very little editorial oversight.
Here’s what sometimes happens with novel writers. Sometimes, they get a huge commercial success early on. And their editors run scared. Suddenly, the very people who helped them knock it out of the ballpart by telling them how to get better, are afraid to touch the work and help them make it better.
You probably know of book series where the first book was an absolute gem, and the second one was okay, and the last one was a hot steaming mess (Divergent, Hunger Games, Twilight… name your vice).
It’s not always the case, but very often this is because editors get scared. They don’t want to mess with the genius, and even they don’t realize that they are part of the genius.
So, why am I telling you all this?
Because I want you to understand that a phenomenal developmental editor make be the difference between your book being masterfully rendered and fully embodying your vision for it… and it being… well, a hot mess.
A great developmental editor can see:
What’s strong and needs to be highlighted
What’s weak and should be taken out or improved
Where your structure needs shoring up or reorganizing
How your book needs to flow in order to keep the reader engaged
A world-class developmental editor will see and hear your voice through the mess of an early draft and help you refine, polish, and lift it up into the light.
They’ll know where to start and where to end. Which stories to expand on and which ones to take out.
A great developmental editor creates clarity and can turn what feels to you like an info dump into a polished work of art that you can be proud of (and that readers will flock to).
This should be an iterative process, where you return the draft to your editor multiple times until you’re both satisfied that it fulfills your vision.
This all needs to happen BEFORE your copyeditor gets their hands on it. Copyediting is what most people think of when they think of editing–it’s making sure the draft is clean, free of grammatical errors, that the writing is nice and tight and consistent.
But you don’t want to involve the copyeditor before you have a manuscript you’re proud of. And you need a developmental editor for that.
This is as true for non-fiction as fiction.
I’m proud of the work I do, because I know it helps authors to create the work that they dreamed of, better than they dreamed of it.
Because I know a secret.
There may be people to whom writing comes more naturally, and others who have to work harder at it. People who study the craft of writing and get good at it.
But there is no binary of “good writers and bad writers.”
What there is, is a binary (and a spectrum in the middle) of “people with great editors and people without them.”
Which one do you plan to be?
