Editing is Only Good If the Editing is Good and a Lot of Editing is Not Good

the worship of editing as an inherent good is pious, disingenuous, and unhelpful

In a piece reflecting on the new Maggie Nelson book about Taylor Swift and Sylvia Plath, BDM discusses one of the most tiresome cliches in this business:

when people call for an editor for a specific piece of work or say something like “if this was a student paper, I’d…” rhetorically what they’re doing is refusing to acknowledge somebody as a peer. The statement is, you are still a student, you are still learning, you cannot trust your instincts, you have to be curbed and taught before you can be trusted to be doing something on purpose. I say all this as somebody who was an editor and who values editors and who has had her work improved by editors; most people benefit from collaboration and I certainly do. But that’s not the subtext of the statement that somebody “needs an editor.”

That’s quite right. “You/This could use an editor” is sometimes true, rarely kind, and very rarely actually helpful, and for the reasons BDM says - it’s almost never said with any sincerity, but as a way to big-time someone, to assert their lack of professional stature. It’s the classic example of a piece of advice that potentially can serve a helpful purpose but almost never does in practice. For example! This piece in New York’s Book Gossip newsletter rounds up a lot of anonymous opinions from publishing industry insiders. This is, unsurprisingly, an annoying exercise; publishing is not quite as dominated by insiderism and clubbiness as news media, but it’s close. And that collection of pithy little insults showcases several instances of exactly what BDM describes, the use of “could use an editor” as a vague and condescending pejorative. This is, of course, a matter of people who work in a threatened industry that’s built on gatekeeping throwing a little condescension towards people who work outside of that industry. That editing is indeed often invaluable and that many writers could stand to receive more of it doesn’t change the fact that anonymous publishing bigwigs saying so isn’t constructive and isn’t intended to be. I hate when insult masquerades as advice.

Variations on “this person could really use an editor” are the most tiresome phrases in the contemporary critical lexicon. It’s an empty move that’s regularly pulled out by people who know nothing about good writing, deployed in exactly the way BDM alleges, as a way to big-time and dismiss writers without actually offering any critique. And it takes an artform that lives and dies by its specificity, by its attendance to the text, and makes it into a generic mitzvah in a way that demonstrates total ignorance about why editing is good when editing is good. When I hear these blowhards throw around “could use an editor” these days I’m reminded of sports cliches, like “you’ve got to take it to the hoop! or “defense wins championships!”; the statement is just as empty of content, just as cliched, and just as often employed in a way meant to express contempt rather than edify, enlighten, or guide. Kill it with fire.

Here’s where I do the tiresome but necessary (and potentially self-undermining) bit. This line of attack is very often used as an implied accusation of sour grapes; the target of the derision in the newsletter is Substackers and people who self-publish, which is say, those who have had to do it themselves rather than being invited into the club. The suggestion is often that the person who needs editing isn’t good enough to receive it, that is, that they aren’t edited because they haven’t gotten to “the big leagues.” Well, I have been published in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Times of London, The Guardian, Playboy, New York, Harper’s, Politico, n+1, The New Republic, Foreign Policy, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Salon, The Huffington Post, The Week, The Daily Beast, The Observer, City Journal, Vital City, Jacobin, Current Affairs, The Free Press, Vox, Unherd, Compact, Persuasion, and many I have forgotten. I’ve also gotten book contracts from Harvard University Press, St. Martin’s, Simon & Schuster, and Coffee House Press, and soon-ish my agent and I will take my next novel onto the market. I’ve also been published in peer-reviewed academic journals, peer-reviewed edited collections, all manner of pedagogical materials, and I’ve edited textbooks, done developmental editing, and worked as a ghostwriter. I assure you, I am not lacking in the credentials necessary to make the argument I’m making.

I say that this bit here might be self-undermining because I’m asserting credibility based on the approval of the very establishment that whose approval I’m rejecting. But I kind of have to; if I don’t, I open myself up to the suggestion that I don’t like editing because I can’t earn the opportunity to receive any.

“This could use some editing” is presented as a profound insight, a sagacious observation from someone who understands the craft. In reality, it’s a deepity, a bromide, a thought-terminating cliché. It’s a statement that’s true on a trivial level (everyone’s work can be improved and good editing is good) but functions as a false profundity, meant to signal the speaker’s greater sophistication. It’s become a mindless nostrum, a pious invocation of a professional class that we’re all supposed to pretend is a guild of selfless, sagacious elders handing down advice. It needs to stop. We need to stop treating “The Editor” as a noble monolith and start talking about editing as a human activity, which is to say, an activity that is good only when it is actually done well and which is frequently done poorly. Good editing is good. Bad editing is bad. All editing is therefore not good. This shouldn’t be controversial.

In the mythology, the editor is the tireless guide that helps the writer achieve coherence and concision, a selfless midwife to genius, the person who saves the writer from their own worst impulses. And sure, that can happen. Good editing is always useful, and at its best it can be a collaborative miracle. Sometimes being edited is easy, and sometimes it’s hard; this largely depends on the writer’s emotional investment in a piece and the skill of the editor in question. (For the record, while I’m passionate about my work and will fight over an edit I think is wrong, people who assume that I’m difficult to edit are just wrong.) Editing can hurt even when it’s the right advice, but the pain is momentary; indeed, I’ve often found that the preemptive worrying about how a piece will be edited is far worse than the experience itself. A good editor knows what they absolutely need from the process, what they want, and what they’re willing to negotiate. A good writer knows the same things, and together they work it out. It’s both cooperative and adversarial. It should always be remembered that editing is a specific, rare skill that requires a unique blend of total empathy for the writer’s intent and a totally cold-blooded attitude regarding the writer’s feelings. When you find a good editor, you know it, and you want to work with them again.

But the blanket statement “editing is good” is as vapid as saying “writing is good” or “advice is good,” and that vapidity permeates writing culture. The fetish for revision, “all writing is rewriting” - these are guilty of the same basic illogic of the embrace of editing as a universal salve. The worst writer you’ve ever read has heard that all writing is rewriting and has done a lot of revising. It doesn’t help if the revisions don’t make the piece better! There’s no inherent value to revision, only the value of the specific revisions. So too with editing. Yes, editing is on balance a net good in the universe of the written word, but that’s no more meaningful than the fact that editing is on balance a net good in the universe of filmmaking. A movie can still be edited incompetently. These vague nostrums tell you nothing about the quality of a specific intervention. We have reached a point where people treat the process of editing as inherently virtuous, regardless of the outcome. It’s a category error. Writing is an activity that produces a result; editing is a process that modifies that result. Both can be done with exquisite skill or with ham-fisted clumsiness. They aren’t intrinsically good or bad.

The assumption that editing is good in and of itself implies a belief that any given change to a piece is an improvement, which is of course not true. At worst, it’s a lie that media and the publishing industry tell themselves to justify overhead.

The added context of this, in media, is that the traditional professional structures that produced editors with a lot of experience (editing experience and, very often, writing experience too) have collapsed. This data is ten years old and the reality has only gotten bleaker since then. The local and regional newspapers of this country were once great incubators of editing talent and expertise, but newspapers have collapsed, to the great detriment of journalism, writing, and editing. An editor who came up through various newsrooms, whether or not they fit some sort of Marlboro-chewing grizzled stereotype, was someone who had credibility, who knew how to manage a writer’s attitude while doing what was best for a given piece, and who had a sense of professional security that was invaluable. That’s because (and let me break out the bold font for this) overediting is as destructive as underediting. The trouble is that, today, a ton of editing positions are filled by young people with very little experience, no job security to speak of, and sky-high ambitions. The result is a lot of anxious young strivers who want to prove that they deserve their salaries, engaged in a job where more is definitely not the same as better.

This isn’t a critique of their character, it’s a critique of the labor market. But it creates a disastrous incentive structure. If you’re a twenty-four-year-old assistant editor at a major magazine or a mid-level staffer at a publishing house, and you’re tasked with “editing” a writer who’s been doing this for thirty years, you face a psychological crisis. If you read the piece and realize it’s actually quite good and doesn’t need much work, you have a problem: if you send it back with no changes, what are you even doing there? How do you justify your salary to your boss? How do you prove you’re “adding value”? I can tell you, as someone with twenty years of experience in this business, that this dynamic is very real. The result is what I would call performative editing, the act of editing for its own sake - moving commas, swapping synonyms, and restructuring paragraphs not because the prose demands it, but because the editor’s ego and job security demand it. They edit more than they have to because they feel the need to leave their fingerprints on the glass. They want to be able to say, “I fixed that,” even if what they did was take a sharp, idiosyncratic sentence and sand it down into the smooth, characterless house style that makes every article on the internet sound like it was written by the same sentient AI trained on back issues of the Financial Times.

Look, I’m not a big deal by anyone’s standards, and while I have plenty of flaws, I don’t get hung up on status. (I would need more status to be invested in it.) I write for all kinds of publications, big and small. But I have been around the block, and I can tell you that being a professional writer today often involves being edited by people whose advice you have absolutely no reason to trust. In the old days, an editor was often a peer or a mentor. Today, due to the collapse of media finances and the churn of the publishing industry, you’re frequently being handled by people who don’t read the genre you write in, don’t understand your references, and are primarily concerned with whether a certain phrase might cause a PR headache. Why should a writer defer to that? Why should the editor necessarily be granted the benefit of the doubt when the material reality of the industry suggests they’re often just a nervous kid with a track changes habit?

The New York Times is frequently criticized by freelancers (and sometimes stars) in these terms, although as is often the case with the Times, few people feel safe enough to make these complaints publicly. But you hear it more and more often, that the NYT is now a place where your work will be relentlessly over-worked like dough by an inexperienced baker, until it has none of your own flavor. (Word from within the building is that this is the influence of Deputy Head of Opinion Patrick Healy, who is also often said to be in effect the “shadow editor” of the whole Opinion department, more influential than nominal chief Kathleen Kingsbury, but all of this scuttlebutt is well over my head.) And of course the Times is the most influential publication in the business. I sincerely hope that this particular practice is not influential to their usual degree.

This shift from the seasoned editor of yore - who might be good at it, or might not, but at least had obvious reasons to have earned the position that they did - to the contemporary editorial function is, at its heart, a triumph of the managerial class over the creative act. In the mid-century mythos, the editor was a mentor, a grizzled, somewhat-alcoholic craftsman who lived in the guts of the prose, arguing over the placement of a semicolon or the thematic weight of a character’s departure. That person was a steward of voice, and though they might have gotten into screaming matches with writers, they always and forever defined themselves as the writer’s friend. This is part of why I find “could use some editing blah blah blah” so crass, because it takes what can be an affectionate and mutually-beneficial relationship and makes it into an insult.

Today, the editor is more often a project manager. These days the title “editor” is often given in lieu of a raise, in a financially-imperiled industry, and often to people who take such positions because it offers a sense of career momentum and a potentially-meaningful resume item. Understandably, if lamentably, the modern editor is thus often a person whose primary concern is not the aesthetic integrity of the work but its transit through a bureaucratic system. They manage “deliverables” like a mid-career executive at a car insurance company, navigating sensitivity reads, checking for SEO-friendly headlines, ensuring that the work doesn’t create any friction with the broader institutional brand…. They aren’t looking for the soul of the piece; they’re looking for risk, risk to their employer an thus to themselves. Financial precarity, not individual fecklessness, is to blame. When an editor functions as a risk manager rather than a creative partner, their interventions are almost always reductive. They prune anything that looks like a liability, and in a climate of corporate hypersensitivity, style itself is often viewed as a liability. The result is a clerical approach to literature where the goal is a frictionless, unassailable, and ultimately forgettable product.

The “needs an editor” crowd always assumes that more is better. They see a long book and scream for the shears. They see a sprawling essay and demand “tightening.” But doing too much is genuinely doing too much. Underediting is a sin of omission; it results in a few typos, perhaps a redundant paragraph, a structural wobble in the third act. It’s messy, yes. It can be annoying. But the soul of the work remains intact. The writer’s voice, the only reason we read most pieces in the first place, is still there, vibrating on the page.

Overediting is a sin of commission. At its worst, it’s a lobotomy. When an editor overedits, they don’t just remove the bad parts (and may not even achieve that); muscular overediting removes the connective tissue, the weirdness, the specific stylistic tics that make a writer’s work recognizable. Overediting homogenizes, turns perhaps-overcooked steaks into a slurry of grey protein instead. You can fix a typo in a second edition, but you can’t reinject life into a manuscript that has been bled dry by a thousand “clarifying” queries. To say “editing is good” is like saying “medicine is good.” Yes, in the abstract, medicine is a marvel. But if you have a broken leg and the doctor chooses to amputate rather than to just set the bone, the fact that medicine is good in general is cold comfort.

What we want, ultimately and obviously, is the right amount of editing, of the right type, in the right places. This is of course easier said than done, and the structural problems in both media and publishing don’t make it easy on anyone in the editor role, which I don’t need to tell you is often invisible and thankless. But we shouldn’t give up on the ideal. Most writing is a struggle between a person and the limits of their own mind. Sometimes that person wins, and sometimes they lose. Adding another craftsman to the mix can be just the right way to break the tie, but the presence of an editor doesn’t automatically improve the odds. Sometimes, the addition of another set of hands into the process only ensures that if the writer loses, they lose in the most boring way possible.

I’ll take a fascinating, ambitious, overlong, messy failure of a 500-page doorstop over a careful, perfectly edited, 200-page novel that risks nothing any day of the week, and so should you. I’ll take a meandering and digressive longread that actually provokes unique feelings in me over a tight 1200 words that explains and argues but never inspires. I also recognize that length is not the enemy, not in the era of the endless scroll. Of course concision is better sometimes, maybe even most of the time. But the idea that it’s an inherent good stems from an era where ink and paper were calculated into the price of every piece, and today they don’t have to be. Orthodoxies about the preference for the short and the simple have existed for a long, long time, and yet they haven’t left us in some renaissance for books, journalism, and written commentary. More than anything, if you care about editing, you should care about the professional conditions that have left editors inexperienced, undertrained, underpaid, and constantly scared for their jobs. Nothing gets better unless that reality improves.

Of course, some of you will respond to this piece by saying “The irony is, this piece could have used an editor!” But, honestly… why bother?