As I’ve discussed here, much of the writing and non-writing world seems to misunderstand and devalue the role of editors. Many writers resent them, believing them naught but capricious gatekeepers and malicious copy-wreckers. Very few editors deserve that reputation. The resentment arises, I believe, from a misguided faith in the cult of the writer -- a belief that writers are divinely inspired beings receiving pure talent directly from God. The New Yorker promotes this nonsense with its refusal to print a masthead and acknowledge the incredibly talented editors on its staff. Instead, all we readers get is the writer’s byline. Anybody who thinks the copy in the magazine is entirely the work of the writer is deluded.

Editing is everything. Writing a first draft is akin to moving a big block of marble into a sculptor’s studio. It’s hard, and it requires some finesse, but mostly it’s just heavy lifting. It isn’t art. The art happens when the marble starts getting chipped away to find the Pieta within. And that is the role of the editor -- with luck, in concert with the writer.

Writers don’t need to roll over to every change an editor demands. Standing up for one’s work is fine. But writers whose first impulse is resistance, who swoon and gnash their teeth over any changes, are making a serious mistake. Writing is collaborative, and that second pair of eyeballs is as important, in many ways, as the first.

The trick is finding a good editor. I worked at five newspapers during the first six years of my career, constantly moving in search of editors who would improve my copy. A main reason why working for The New Yorker was so great -- aside from the money, the prestige, the word-length, and the time -- was the excellence of the editing. For my first book, I had a grand old lion of the publishing world as my editor -- a hard-drinking, cigarette wolfing raconteur who’d edited Norman Mailer and Ellen Gilchrist. He was great on the broad conceptual stuff, but did almost no line editing. For my second, I had a callow young coward who seemed to do nothing but go to lunch for a living. He added no value at all and often got in the way. I struck gold on my third book, with an editor who thoroughly engaged the copy line by line and had a life-saving sense of the extent to which I could employ the tools of fiction in a non-fiction book.

I’ve been able to weather the ups and downs in outside editing because I have Margaret, who has been my wife and writing partner since 1987. She’s the best editor I’ve ever encountered, and I’m not the only one who thinks so. She’s begun editing others’ novels, non-fiction, and articles on a freelance basis, and is making a lot of people happy. Just today, though, she had a telling thing happen.

One of her clients has a contract with a major publishing house for a non-fiction book. The client is getting nothing out of her publishing-house editor and wants to produce a really good book. She asked her editor to free up some money from her advance so she could pay Margaret to edit the copy. She wasn’t asking for more money, mind you, just a little more of her own advance up front so that she could pay a real editor. The publishing house refused. To have allowed her to use an outside editor, it would have been admitting that its own “editor” was useless. So the writer is denied proper editing, and the publishing house will get a less polished manuscript. Everybody loses.

Point is: Unless you’re a wiggy-brilliant once-in-a-generation genius, you need good editors. If you aren’t happy with the ones you’re working with now, find others that you like and trust.