a complete pedant to be a good editor? The thought has crossed my mind.

Depends which kind of editing you mean. For copy-editing, yes you need to fuss about ever last twig, line editing's about knowing how to prune individual branches and decide which actual trees should be culled, for structural editing you need to be able to see the wood and even the forest.

Of course in practice the skills overlap, but I've always found it helps to think of them as different mindsets, even if I'm trying to do more than one at the same time.

Emma

Maybe you are thinking of proof readers, Traveller.

I don't know what makes a good editor, but if I had to hazard a guess I would say an editor should be able to see what the writer is trying to say, and help them to get there. They should treat the story dispassionately; not be swayed by whether they like or dislike the novel, otherwise they risk trying to mould it into something that they, personally, would like to read - unless, of course, they have one eye on commercial interests, and then it depends on whether the writer wants to be published or not.


- NaomiM

Very broadly speaking, I'd say there are two kinds of editing. The first might be called conceptual. It involves finding out what the writer is fundamentally trying to say, which is not always straightforward. A lot of writers create instinctively - digging down below the crusty day-to-day surface life and grabbing hold of a raw emotion or theme, then dragging it to the surface and flinging it on the page. Trouble is, it can't get there without going through that surface consciousness - well, it should go through it, because that's what will make it a story that strangers can relate to. But some writers resist this process, not wishing to spoil the raw beauty of their inspiration. So, quite often they have to be encouraged to articulate what it is they probably prefer to believe can't be discussed. Here, I think a good editor has to be able to feel what the writer is feeling and have the same desire to see it expressed. The tough side of this is that the editor sometimes has to steer the writer back into the creative source, to better define it; and writers don't always want to do that. In this respect, the editor is a kind of middle-man between the rush of inspiration that thrills the writer and the more prosaic demands of the reader who mostly just wants a good story.

The second kind of editing is the one where your question ruffles editorial feathers, if not even giving them a good plucking. This is to do with mechanics, logistics, consistencies, building blocks, etc, and amounts to the editor being very literal. But really it's his job to be so. For instance, a singer would expect a singing coach to spot when they're off key, for three basic reasons, I think: 1) it's their profession and they want to get it right; 2) there will be some people in the audience who will notice the odd bum note; 3) everyone in the audience will at some level at least sense when something isn't right with the singing.

The problem with writing is that, unlike music, we all use words all the time, so there is a tendency to believe that we can get away with writing in the same way we talk, e.g. with lots of filler and passive words, non-connecting clauses, etc. And it could be argued that most readers won't notice the odd filler word or slack bit of dialogue, but I think they do sense when something's out of place - just as a non-musical person senses when an instrument's not tuned properly.

For example, I'm currently reading Stephen King's latest novel (for a course I'm doing soon). Now, King is very entertaining when he has a rant against the literary establishment and their snobbery towards someone like him. But when right at the start of his book I noticed he was using the word 'enormous' rather a lot. So I counted one page's worth, and saw he'd used it 8 times; twice in the same sentence. Okay, maybe I noticed that because I'm an editor, but I believe most readers will at least sense a certain degree of casualness there, even laziness, and if that continues, will eventually come to lose trust in his story-telling.

So, I think editing begins with being able to encourage the shaping into story of a writer's creative surge, without extinguishing it, and it ends with being a literal pedant.

Terry

For the first time I have just been through significant editing of a book by my publishers and it's interesting. There seems to be a strangely rigid demarcation, from what I've seen, between what the editor does and what is left for the copy editor. Things like repeated words (using 'enormous' eight times on a page) would come in at copy editing - the mechanical part - along with typos or any awkward phrasing, and continuity errors, and factual queries (would it really be getting dark at 6.30 in March?) The actual editor seems to limit herself (at least in my case) to the conceptual part, the part to do with the actual story - e.g. trimming out sections that seem too much of a diversion, or querying a line not on grounds of writing but of e.g. 'whether that X would say that' or 'whether this would put the reader out of sympathy with Y'. She never touches the writing at all - that seems to be a copy editing thing - and the copy editor, by contrast, seems not to have to engage with the story.

So, I agree with others - it's the copy editor who has to be the pedant.

Rosy

Sadly, or maybe luckily, my editor does both. So pedantic is she that she spotted my MC had eaten a Kit Kat in two seperate scenes and felt it would be better if the second bar were a Picnic.
Add to that the fact that my agent spent a lot of his life as an editor and the buggers will let me get away with nowt between them.
HB x