Why I Need an Editor (and you do too)

Work on my kickstarted YA noir superhero novel Enter the Bluebird continues.  We're about a third of the way through the edits, and working on this has made me really appreciate both my editor on this project and the work of editors in general.

With publishing an ebook now an absurdly easy task, it's probably pretty tempting, especially for those of us with an eye for spelling and punctuation mistakes, to say "forget the editor! I'll just put it up there!" (Ahem.  I may know of a project that was done this way.)

But it's really important to get fresh eyes on your work.  Because when you're deep into a project, you stop being able to see it as someone who is not you might see it.  And people who are not you are, after all, your audience.  

I'm getting notes on Enter the Bluebird asking for clarification of stuff that was perfectly clear--in my mind. Not so much on the page, as it turns out. I have read this book at least three times after writing it and never saw this stuff.  There are parts that I knew needed work, but Deb is having me work on the parts I didn't know needed work.  

That's why this book is going to be freaking top shelf, and that's why we all need editors.

For more evidence, let's turn to the world of popular music.  Most of the best rock and roll songs are written either by teams or in the context of a longstanding group.  Lennon/McCartney, Jagger/Richards, Morrissey/Marr, Strummer/Jones, etc. etc.  And none of these guys has equalled on their own what they did as part of a collaboration.  I don't think that popular music is necessarily a collaborative art form--I think it's just that each member of the team is acting as an informal editor keeping the worst impulses of the other in check. Even in groups with one songwriter, I believe the other members of the group are there calling bullshit on stuff that doesn't work.  Or perhaps it's even that songwriters internalize the voice of the other group members and won't even bring them a song that's not going to work because they are imagining the response.  So Pete Townshend pretty much only wrote good songs with the Who, Sting strangely managed to get both more pretentious and cheesier without the Police, and Daryl Hall's solo efforts always fell flat. (Now we finally know what John Oates did!)

I think it's really important for anyone who is creating anything to have someone involved in the process who is supportive but not inherently impressed with you .  Somebody who can look at what you've done and say, "wow, this part is awesome!  And this other part really isn't."