Editors and Editing

The hidden work that matters more than you think

People talk about editing as if it’s a final tidy-up. A wee polish before something goes out into the world. That’s not editing. Nor is it proofreading, for that matter.

If you’ve ever had a piece properly edited, you’ll know it can feel a bit exposing. You send something off thinking it’s nearly there, and it comes back with questions you didn’t expect. Not huge, dramatic rewrites. Smaller things. Why this line. Why this order. Why this word and not another. Who is this character, and did you know they seem to have a cup of tea every other chapter? A wee wink to my editor here, thank you for wringing the tea out of The Broken Pane.

My own process usually looks something like this. First draft. Then a careful read-through. Realise it needs a rewrite. Second draft. Pull it apart. Possibly remove a character and go again. Third draft. Then, finally, I think I’m ready for a developmental edit. That’s the big one. Does everything hang together. Is it all pulling in the same direction. After that, I proofread. Then I spellcheck again. Then one more pass before sending it on to… an editor.

A great editor is invisible. You don’t notice their work when you read a finished poem or article. You don’t trip over anything. That’s usually because someone has spent time asking quite precise questions about it.

When I’m editing (poetry), I read a piece several times. First time through, I’m just getting a feel for it. After that, I start noticing where I slow down. Where I have to reread. Where something feels slightly off, even if I can’t immediately say why.

This is also why it’s hard to be your own editor at the final stage. When you’re editing your own work, there are still useful tools. I love the “find” function. It’s a quick way to spot overuse. I learnt that the hard way when over 500 instances of “very” showed up in The Broken Pane. That was a humbling moment.

Look at your own habits. Where do you hesitate. Where does your focus stray. Have you skimmed over something important and over-explained something else. You need to be honest about what the piece is actually doing on the page.

Working with someone else adds another layer. I’m lucky in that I’ve been on both sides of this, particularly through my work with Stewed Rhubarb Press, where I often edit other writers’ work. There’s trust involved. The writer isn’t just handing over something they’ve spent time on, sometimes a lot of time, and asking someone to look at it closely. They’re handing over a fair bit of themselves as well. Hopes, effort, a lot of thinking. Hopefully not actual blood, but certainly a fair amount of graft.

So a good editor needs to read carefully and respond carefully. The job isn’t to rewrite it in your own voice. It’s to help the writer see what they’ve actually got. Sometimes that’s straightforward. You point out repetition. You suggest a cut. With poetry, maybe a stanza needs to go, or something needs added to balance it.

Editing isn’t always tidy, though. You ask a question and the answer isn’t obvious. You can feel something isn’t working, but it takes a few passes to work out why. The harder moments are when the writer can’t yet see the issue. Or when they thought editing would be a quick spellcheck and nothing more.

As a writer, you do need a degree of humility to go through the process. Good editing often feels slightly uncomfortable. We’ve all been told to cut a line we really like. There’s a reason “kill your darlings” has stuck around. In my second novel, the one I’m currently trying to find a home for, I realised the opening chapter was me circling the start. I liked it. It had a nice feel. I cut the whole thing. That’s what was needed.

It might mean cutting the first three lines of a poem because you’re warming up. It happens all the time. You write your way into the piece, and once you’re there, the opening isn’t needed anymore. It might mean looking at the final lines and asking whether you’ve already finished. A lot of pieces run on. You’ve said the thing, then you say it again slightly differently. If you take those last lines off, the ending is often stronger. It's not always easy. In fact, it can be quite upsetting. I'll be honest, I sometimes have that reaction when I’m edited. A brief moment of thinking, no, that stays. Then, if I sit with it, I usually see the point. If you’re working with an editor, that’s part of the process. You don’t have to accept every suggestion, but you do need to consider it properly. If the same issue comes up more than once, it’s worth paying attention.

Then there’s language. Have you named the emotion directly. Words like love, grief, anger. They’re not wrong, but they can flatten a piece if you rely on them too much. Can you show it instead. Can you let the reader feel it without spelling it out.

There’s also instinct, which builds over time. The more you read and the more you edit, the more patterns you recognise. You start to see where a piece is doing too much, or not quite enough. You get a feel for pacing. For when to push and when to leave something alone. That part comes with experience.

I’ve spent years reading submissions, working on pamphlets, editing individual pieces. You start to notice the same issues. Strong work that loses confidence halfway through. Openings that take too long. Endings that don’t quite land. Good ideas that haven’t been fully shaped yet. Pamphlets that read like a collection of strong individual poems, but don’t quite hold together as a whole. You see what happens when it clicks. When a piece has been properly edited, it reads cleanly. You’re not distracted. You’re not second guessing.

That’s the point.

Editing doesn’t just tidy up the surface. It changes how the piece works. The structure, the order, the emphasis. You’re shaping how the reader experiences it. That applies whether you’re writing poetry, essays, or anything else. There's a lot you can do a lot on your own, and you should. Learning to edit your own work is part of becoming a better writer. But there’s a limit to how far you can see your own habits. You know what you meant. That gets in the way. Any other reader doesn’t have that. They only see what’s on the page. That’s why editing matters.

It’s not an add-on. It’s part of the writing. It takes time and attention and asks you to look again at something you thought was finished and decide whether it really is. If you’re serious about your work, do as much as you can yourself first. Then accept that it will benefit from another perspective.

Depending on what you’ve written, you might need more than one stage. For fiction and non-fiction, that often starts with a developmental editor, someone looking at the bigger picture. Plot, structure, character, cohesion. For poetry, you’re more likely to need a line editor, someone working closely with language, tone, clarity, and flow.

There’s overlap, of course, but most editors lean one way or the other.

I’m now at the stage with my second novel where I’m looking forward to that process again, once it finds the right home. I'm loooking forward to meeting my editor. I feel a bit like Rae in Where’s My Husband, except I’m asking, where’s my editor?