Becoming an editor. A really good editor.
I decided that I
wanted to be an editor when I was sixteen, and I’ve stuck with it. Sophomore
year in high school may seem a little early to be deciding what I want to do
with my life, especially since most people are still confused by sophomore year
in college, but I’m the type of person who makes big decisions and sticks with
them, and I decided I wanted to be an editor. A really good editor. I’ve shared
my dream with a lot of people, and I almost find it a little odd that many people
react in the same way: “Yeah, I can see that. I can see you as an editor.” As
much as this is my dream, I don’t think I share the same image of “Danielle the
editor” that others immediately get. Even though this is my dream, I feel like
this image is so far away from me. But, there is one thing that I’m confident
in, whether I have that fully formed image yet or not, I’m going to be great at
editing, because I commit to things. Five years ago, I committed to being the
greatest editor I can be, and I refuse to disappoint myself or anyone else
who has ever had that vision of me, taking over the world of writing one Oxford
comma at a time.
I didn’t really know
what an editor was when I decided that I wanted to be one. It seems silly now
that I would have chosen a life I didn’t know anything about, but editing does
fit me surprisingly well. What is an
editor? is a question that I have been discovering the answer to as I have
started taking editing classes, looked into editing internships, and begun
doing editing projects of my own, but what
makes a good editor? That’s what I’m trying to find out, and I suppose to
be a great editor one must first figure out what great editing is.
I think that to edit you have to know how to write. You
have to know how incredibly painful it is to write. When I’m sitting at my desk
at 2 a.m. staring at a blank page—because my writers block never breaks until
about 4 a.m.—I always think of a quote that I once read from Kurt Vonnegut:
“When I write I feel like an armless, legless man, with a crayon in his mouth.”
This quote never fails to remind me that I’m not the only one who suffers when
it comes to writing. Writing is really hard, and I think that’s important to
remember when you’re editing someone else’s work. What I am about to attack
with my editing marks, the author worked really hard on, but that doesn’t mean
it’s perfect. Letting other people edit
my own work, work that I put so much into, is even harder, but I also
acknowledge that it’s almost impossible for me to edit my own writing. After
all, why would I want to tear apart something that I worked so hard on in the
first place? But, it’s for the best. It always is.
I wrote my first real essay in the fourth grade; it was
about panda bears. I wrote my first good essay sophomore year, it was about
Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” (apparently it was a life changing year when it comes to me and
the written word). Since then, I have dedicated myself to trying to figure out
writing: updating a weekly blog, writing for one of Brigham Young University’s student
journals, and writing essays that I keep hidden on my computer’s hard-drive. It’s
taken some time for me to figure writing out, and of course I’m still figuring
it out, but learning how to write is something that I have worked hard on, so
that I can be an editor. A really good editor.
The next step in becoming a good editor is knowing the
basics, those fundamental principles of grammar that start in grade school
where you discover nouns, and verbs, and adverbs, and develop in later years into
prepositions, and pronouns, and modifiers. Brigham Young University’s editing
minor starts with the basics: breaking words down, breaking sentences down,
breaking skills down that you thought you had already mastered in grammar.
There are three to four grammar classes that I had to take before taking the class
Basic Editing Skills. This has made it clear to me that to be a good editor,
you have to know your grammar, and you have to know it well. It was a little
daunting reading from The Copy Editor’s
Handbook “In many ways, being a copyeditor is like sitting for an English
exam that never ends: At every moment, your knowledge of spelling, grammar,
punctuation, usage, syntax, and diction is being tested” (Einsohn 4). I finally
feel validated in all the hours that I spent diagramming sentences for Ms. Walker’s
sixth grade English class, so that maybe those hours can one day help me pass
this “test” of the editing world.
When
going through my editing classes, I really struggled in my Modern American
Usage class, and for a summer I thought this meant that I wasn’t going to get
to be an editor. For awhile, I thought my dreams were dashed—that the sixteen
year old me had made a bad decision—and I started looking into other majors and
minors and other professions, but I didn’t want any of them. I just wanted to
be an editor. I looked back at what I had failed to learn in that class; and I
learned it, because if those were the skills that I needed to be an editor, and
if that was the knowledge that I needed to have, I was going to master it. I
still slip up on my grammar. Please don’t get nervous as soon as you hear I am
an editing minor, and assume that I will catch your every mistake. It actually doesn’t
matter to me that you used the wrong version of your/you’re in that text,
because I make mistakes all the time too, but I’m learning how not to so that I
can be a good editor. A really good editor.
Once you
learn what the rules are, it’s time to learn how to break them. Beautiful
writing does not pass every rule in the grammar book. A lot of the time, what
makes writing beautiful is that it dares to reject the rules and create its
own. As an editor, you can’t take this away from the writer. As M. Lincoln
Schuster explained, “Don’t worry too much about the mistakes you make
deliberately, that is, disappointments and failure that may come from taking a
calculated risk. Editing and publishing are risk-taking professions—sometimes
they are wild gambles” (Gross 25). I hope that as an editor I get some chances
to take risks and to let things that don’t work technically work lyrically. Perhaps
sometimes this will fail, but sometimes it will be brilliant. And being a good
editor means letting writing be brilliant, even if it breaks the rules.
To me,
editing someone else’s writing is a lot like putting on make-up in the morning.
It’s not what makes you pretty, but it sure can make you prettier: When you
edit, you aren’t going to be what makes something great, but you sure can make
it greater. I know I’m going to be a good editor because I want it. I want to
be the person that makes writing greater. Williams said, “Editors themselves
will remain subject to the ‘joy, fulfillment, grief, and frustration’ of their
craft, hoping that their ultimately invisible labor will make a real and
positive difference” (Gross 9). This is what I can see ahead of me. Editing
will bring me great joy and great misery, but this is what I want. I want to be
an editor and I want to be everything that comes along with that title.
If I
think about it, I can see what others see when they get a vision of me as an
editor, and I’m not going to let that vision get away from me. I’m willing to
work for it, and I’m willing to do what it takes to get there. There is still
so much about the world of editing that is mysterious to me. I don’t have any
personal friends who are editors, and I don’t have family members who have told
me all about it, so I feel like I’m forging my own path, but that’s also what
makes it exciting to me. I did a lot of dumb things when I was sixteen—like we
all did—but I did one thing right. I decided I wanted to be an editor, and I’ve
been working towards that ever since. I won’t stop now. I am going to be an
editor. A really good editor.
peace. love. and dream jobs.
Works Cited
Einsohn, Amy. The Copyeditor’s Handbook. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2011. Print.
Gross, Gerald,
ed. Editors on Editing: What Writers Need
to Know About What Editors Do. New York: Grove Press, 1993. Print.
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