My dad and I had an interesting discussion the other night. We weren't talking about writing in particular, but he told me that editing was easy, but creating was hard.
But I have to disagree. I think maybe he was confusing editing with criticism or negative feedback; just about everyone would agree that destruction is far easier than creation. But editing isn't criticism or negative feedback. It's about using feedback to make something greater than what it was, while still retaining its core competencies and strengths (or, if you prefer, its soul).
Creation is easy. It's fun and exciting to create new things, to build where nothing existed before. And when working creatively, quality isn't the first priority either; it's about experimentation. You can't ever be afraid of bad ideas when you're creating. In the words of Nanowrimo, it's about turning off your inner editor during that month in November.
Editing is hard. And worse, it's not fun; it requires discipline. It's especially agonizing to painstakingly drag your own work through the coals, to figure out where all the errors are and how to fix them without destroying the book altogether.
As a side note, it seems to me that a good editor can make or break a book almost as surely as a good writer; I think most fans of the series would agree that Wheel of Time really suffers from poor editing in its later books. And many times, in fact almost all times, writers thank their editors in some notes page, or even the dedication page.
But I mean, they helped build the damn book in the first place. Some special note of thanks doesn't quite seem like enough for the second most important determinant of quality. Why don't editors get their names on the front page of the novel? Maybe it's because we think that readers don't base their purchasing decisions on the editor of books, but I'm not sure there's much data to support either argument. If I was publishing a book, I'd probably push for my editor's name to appear on the front cover of the book.
If only everyone was as grateful as you.
ReplyDeleteYou see, the problem with the internet is that it's hard to distinguish sarcasm.
ReplyDeleteBecause I'm not all that grateful of a person. Way back when I played MMOs, people would thank you for heals. I would always snap that you don't need to thank me for doing my job, and I have that same attitude towards others. Not that I'm impolite or anything, of course, except when I mean to be.
But I also think that people deserve proper recognition for what they do. More, they enjoy that recognition. I remember learning that at a BMW manufacturing plant, one of the jobs required signing your name to a car, to make sure that a certain step of the inspection/construction process was completed. A problem arose because everyone on the assembly line wanted to sign the cars they made, wanted the recognition of crafting the BMW.
And that's creating a BMW.
I understand why publishers don't put the editor's name on the cover: that's valuable space. It's the same reason why we advertise the names of the actors, but not the names of the costume designers: only one drives consumer purchasing behavior. The thought is that the editor, while important, is support personnel.
But I could certainly imagine buying a book because I liked the work of the editor, as well as liking the author. And let's face it, a good editor is probably not going to end up working on a terrible book.