Editing as chemistry, as therapy, as velociraptor hatching from an egg

What does an editor do, really?

What is editing? Three years ago when I was hired as an editor, I found myself asking this question a lot. My work trial — I had an hour to edit a 1,500 word piece — supposedly demonstrated my promise in the role. But every time I turned around a piece, I wondered whether what I’d done was in the scope of the job description. There’s lots of writing on writing, there’s almost no writing on editing, and so most of the books I sought out were little help. Nor were conversations I had with editors all that productive. We are, I’ve found, a group with very strong tastes, but underdeveloped abilities to explain what we do, and why.

I’d like to try. The common refrain in this part of the internet is that ‘writing is thinking,’ but I’ve always found this incomplete. For one, I don’t know many people who would willingly submit a first draft as evidence of their thinking ability.

Writing forces you to spend time on a topic, sure. For that reason, it usually guarantees better insights than you’d have through talking, or sitting there thinking. But the real value comes in bootstrapping those insights, as each draft gets layered on top of the other. Writing makes your thinking explicit, but editing is where all the problems get sorted out.

This is Part I in a 3-part series on editing, which will also cover archetypes of first drafts and concrete strategies for editing. I open with a wider aperture: What even is editing? Because after dozens of conversations and a few workshops focused on this question, my answer is still kind of hand-wavey, like:

It is an emergent and mystical process that looks different with every person and every draft. What any piece becomes through editing is contingent on a constellation of factors, the most important of which is something not unlike romantic chemistry. No two people edit alike, and no writer responds — or protests — to editing in the same way. It is beautiful and torturous, sometimes critical, sometimes superfluous.

Past that, what actually happens is best approached through analogy. Here are six.

Editing as cosmetic work

This is an obvious metaphor for editing, the most superficial part of the job. Like a plastic surgeon, an editor beautifies a piece. They cut and reshape, they nip, they tuck, they smooth, they plump, they polish. At Asterisk, we use the term “facelift” when we’re happy with the structure and arguments of a piece and need to take a pass on prose.

Wordsmithing is a discovery process. Words want to sound a certain way. The best writers and editors work to find what feels right as they play with prose. As example, here are the first two paragraphs of my misophonia piece, several months part:

Every teenage boy thinks about fighting his father at some point. Usually it’s just some sort of dominance masculinity thing. For me, it was that I’d realized my dad had developed a popping in his jaw each time he chewed. A click, click, click of the cartilage slipping across his jawbone combined with every bite. This instilled me a sense of disgust and affront that rapidly suffused through my body. It overwhelmed me. It was the beginning of feeling scared that I had no control over what happened in my own head.

It’s a teenage rite of passage to explode into rage at your parents. While the usual outburst is sparked by some combination of hormones, insecurity, and authority issues, for me it was a popping sound in my father’s jaw. I first noticed it at the dinner table. Every time he took a bite, the disc of cartilage that cushioned his jawbone would slip out of place and snap back. Chew, click, chew, click. Like a drum, his mouth reverberated the sound, which changed in pitch each time he opened to take a bite. Layered beneath all of this was the wet percussion of normal chewing. The trio — jaw pop, meat squish, fork scraping teeth — became inescapable. And it drove into me, first through my chest, a surprising shock of affront and disgust that then suffused through my whole body. It was the first time I ever got scared that I wasn’t in control of what was inside my own head.

I think the second paragraph is much richer, much more immersive in the experience. But that’s me editing myself, in my own voice. I know what I want, I know what sounds like me. Editors go wrong in the same ways that plastic surgery goes wrong. It’s a question of when to stop.

I lived for several years in the Pacific Palisades, where cosmetic work is eerily normalized. If you live in any sort of normie location, it’s hard to describe how disconcerting it is to suddenly find yourself in an area where facial surgeries spread like fads. In the first few months after moving, I couldn’t stop talking to my wife about what I was seeing every time I walked through the Palisades Village: lip fillers, cheek filler, buccal fat removal. She, having lived in LA at other points in her life, had stopped registering it so strongly and just kind of nodded along.

Two years on, it stopped registering for me, too. The reason, I realized, was that everyone was getting the same work done. Every surgery made everyone look the same.

If you gave me, blinded, short selections from an assortment of New Yorker articles, I’m not confident I’d be able to tell the difference between authors, though I am confident I’d be able to tell The New Yorker from other magazines (diaeresis aside). I love the magazine, but their house style is famously consistent, easily recognizable, nearly prescriptive. You know what you’re reading will be good, but it will mostly sound the same.¹

My fear is that this is how I end up editing Asterisk: that every piece sounds like it got lip fillers, that I become the person responsible for making everyone sound like a rationalist who went to Iowa Writer’s Workshop, for making Scott Alexander sound like he got the syntactical equivalent of botox.

Editing, like any sort of cosmetic work, is best when it’s judicious. Make-up goes a long way before you really want to go under the knife. A skilled editor needs to reshape and refine, while still retaining the author’s full voice.

Editing as a ouija board

Ouija boards work because of the ideomotor phenomenon: unconsciously, someone with a hand on the planchette directs it towards what they expect (or want) to see. The reason you can’t use a Ouija board alone is that it’s impossible to fool yourself that the planchette can move of its own volition. (This is also the reason that facilitated communication and the entire Telepathy Tapes phenomenon exists.)

An editor is that second hand. Often I read a draft, or a paragraph, or a sentence, and I think something is off. There’s a section that should be here, an argument that hasn’t been made, an example that might lend this sentence a symmetry. There’s some spirit in the room, a spectre haunting the argument.

Authors are sometimes aware of this too. People send drafts and hand wave at what they think is missing, or comment on a paragraph with what doesn’t feel right. But not always. When you’re caught up in the mechanics of a piece, it’s easy to lose sight of where the work itself is pulling you. Your focus is on something else and so you miss the hints.

Some writers describe their writing process as “channeling.” “Stories are found things,” says Stephen King. Before I became more attuned to the mechanics of the writing process in others, I thought this was annoying. Writing is work, effort. Now I find channeling to just be descriptively true of the microphenomenology of the creative process. It’s really not an entirely generative process, but a selective one. Writers have no say in what words or phrases or thoughts or ideas arise, only what they choose to put down. To the extent that anyone earns their writing gifts, it is by honing their taste for what to select. When you hear some author talk about how they copied Joan Didion’s sentences to learn how they worked, it’s not to learn Didion’s prescriptive rules for sentences, but to better subsume the spirit contained in them.

Editing is also a form of channeling. The way I know to prefer this word or phrase is an infinite regression using the same process of deciding what to select. The advantage editors have is that the set of work they’ve trained on is much larger. They can feel beyond the sentence level to what is wrong structurally and conceptually.

Writers can do all this on their own, of course. But it is because they are so attuned to the process of revision that they can effectively treat a first draft as something written by a stranger. Knowing something isn’t quite right, they sense where they meant to go in a previous draft. But one of the emergent properties of collaborative work — the real advantage of editing — is when writer and editor become attuned to the suggestibility of the other. The editor gets to lead the seance. They move the planchette subtly in one direction, and that’s all that was needed. Suddenly the writer understands the path it was supposed to take all along. The spirit of the piece takes ahold of you both.

Editing as chemistry

Being edited can suck. It is intimate, uncomfortably so. You strip naked in front of someone, get asked a series of questions on a topic in which you’re more ecpert, and then get told all of the ways you could both look and sound better while doing it. It is the opposite of unconditional love; in editing you make yourself vulnerable in order to be told how you must change.

The reason that Substack is dominated by treacly emotive personal essays that read like a cross between tumblr and LinkedIn is because submitting to the editing process is so uncomfortable. At times it’s even violating. More than once an author has told me, after a piece has been published, that while they appreciated my help, and even believed I made it a stronger draft than they could have on their own, they hated the process. I came on too strong?

But this is why self-editing is so hard. To do it properly, you need to have the ability to look at your own shit without either flinching or lying to yourself. If you don’t, you’re more likely to attract a different audience than you intended, of a lower quality. You are already a better writer than you think you are if you can hold out for several rounds of revision to produce a higher quality piece. Otherwise you become the equivalent of the person who unwittingly and unconsciously attracts unhealthy partners again and again.

The degree of intimacy required between writer and editor varies across each piece. I’ve come to think of it as a spectrum, from dating to marriage, with the key ingredient something a lot like chemistry, and a successful relationship predicated on the same things as love: affect, trust, respect.

Most of my working relationships with writers are something like casual dating. It’s flirty. We talk about a few topics. We agree on some things, disagree on others. Our boundaries are up, but we’re gracious and open to what the other person says. I think this is what the majority of editing relationships should look like: separate people, respectful contributions, warm formality.

Sometimes, though, the relationship becomes more intertwined. The chemistry’s good. The ideas are fertile and of high interest to both parties, and if both parties have something to contribute, the relationship gets more serious. This takes a variety of forms. An author says “I trust you” and lets us do a heavy line-edit. I do enough research to add a paragraph or two of additional context. If two people are both working in service of an argument (and this applies more heavily to non-fiction), it even comes to look more like co-authorship.²

This, I think, is the answer to a question that Dwarkesh Patel posed to Scott Alexander: Why are there so few good bloggers? Why can Works in Progress put out so many good articles each year, yet few of those writers have their own blogs? “That could be because of the editing,” Scott said.

From having now at least a hundred first drafts that became published articles,³ I would say: It is unambiguously because of the editing. I just don’t think this is a bad thing. The average reader underestimates the extent to which most of the articles they read are edited, often heavily. I estimate that about 70% of a first draft is retained in the final draft, on average. We’ve had some pieces where we change almost nothing, and others almost everything. In many cases our articles are acts of co-creation, of entangled relationships.

The highest culmination then, is something like editing as marriage. (Often this is literal: Didion and Dunne, Henrik and Johanna…) Both parties drop regard for roles because what is being made becomes more like parenting. You are both now in service of this thing that you brought into existence. At the very end of the process you can pick out distinct features that are yours, but the whole is a function of the two.

Editing as a velociraptor hatching from an egg

I have had cemented in my memory, since I was a kid, a scene from Jurassic Park. John Hammond, owner of the park, stares down at an egg that resembles a colossal piece of Easter candy. “I insist,” says Hammond, “on being here when they’re born. An animatronic infant velociraptor delicately puts its claws through the eggshell. Eyes welling in pride, Hammond cheers on the baby dinosaur. Come on, little one, he says. Push. Push!

This, sometimes too, is the role of an editor: to be a proud supporter of a piece, someone who insists on playing a token role in a piece’s creation, but who is only there because they have the money that made all of this possible in the first place.

I think I generally have something to contribute to most pieces, but not always. For some people, either because of their own talents, or because I’m unfamiliar with their field, I can take very little credit except for creating an enabling environment and a word change here or there. Everything else comes from them and from God. Writing, like life, finds a way.

Editing as Phenomenal Nature

Many writers equate their craft with sculpture. “Writing is not like painting where you add,” says Elie Wiesel. “It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible.” “Perfection is achieved,” says St. Exupery, “not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

I guess? Like, yes, but this only applies to the absolute last stage of editing, the final 2% of finishing a piece, and — as many sprawling novels can attest — it isn’t actually necessary unless you’re a real prose stylist. If you hew too closely to this advice when you’re drafting, you won’t get anywhere. I was thinking about all of this one day while listening for the hundredth time to Cassandra Jenkins’ masterpiece “Hard Drive.”

A security guard stopped me to offer an overview

On phenomenal nature

She said, "sculpture is not just formed from penetration

You see, men have lost touch with the feminine"

And with her pink lipstick

And her Queens accent

She went on for a while about our president

I liked this analogy better: paring as penetration, as this masculine and reductive act. But then what is the feminine act of sculpting, and how did it connect back to writing? Trying to find an analogy, I did some searching, and along the way I learned that despite knowing every word to this song, I had never fully understood the context of one line.

I’d taken phenomenal nature to be the security guard’s neologism for a new-agey conception of gender roles. Nope. Phenomenal Nature was the name of the retrospective show of the Indian sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee, held at the Met in 2019.

Mukherjee created sculptures made of hand-dyed jute, hemp, and cotton rope. She developed her own form of macrame — half, square, and hitch knots — layered and repeated in dense fields of texture. Although she usually worked with a thin internal armature, much of the structure came from her transformation of the rope itself, which knot by knot took on fantastical but vaguely human forms. Parts loop over each other, bend back on themselves, arc in unexpected ways. Wholly unlike stone, as something to be shaped down, Mukherjee built up. “You start somewhere and let it grow,” she said.

If an editor were to conceive of a writer’s work as a block to be pared away, it would be to misunderstand entirely the possibilities of what it might become. Writing is more knotting, weaving, and coiling than sculpting: every sentence must support the next, each successive piece is shaped by the whole. Rope has memory, tension, flexibility. Words coil in specific ways too. Revision can’t be rigid, nor should it be reductive. Each sentence can only be reshaped based on the pressure of neighboring sentences, but you can (sometimes you must) untie half of everything that came before in order to build back up into the proper shape. It should only look solid; underneath it must be pliable. A good editor doesn’t say: here is what this piece must be. They feel through the knots in a piece to say, “Here is what I think I can see it growing into. This is what it can become.”

Editing as therapy

We asked Agnes Callard to write for us for the Weird Issue. She submitted a draft that argued the way most media conceives of weirdness is wrong — that it is not, as children’s literature conceives of it, a strength disguised as a weakness, but a genuine impediment to a happy life. A story parents tell to children to make themselves, not their kids, feel better.

But I can only give you that summary because I’ve read the piece so many times. That first draft was chewy and meandering. It was interspersed with personal anecdotes — Agnes wrote about her own form of weirdness: a tendency to blend people in her mind. But it also had the same criticism of kids' stories, and long digressions into philosophy. Because it operated on so many levels, it never cohered into a whole — even as I liked it, because I like Agnes, and find her brain compelling. In a way, the piece’s inaccessibility seemed to fit the theme, but we knew it was missing something. I admit, though: I was stumped. I had no idea how to edit it except to explain my reaction to it and where I think it came up short. (A less discussed challenge of editing: telling someone with much greater prestige and accomplishment than yourself how to change their piece. The most nervous I’ve ever been in this job is getting on a call with Adrian Tchaikovsky to give him some suggestions for his short story. [He was lovely. Intimidating eyebrows though.])

So Clara, my co-editor, and I got on a call with Agnes to talk it over. At first we talked about the essay — Agnes agreed there were some areas that weren’t working, that she was still in the process of figuring out what she wanted to say. We shared our reflections while reading it. I don’t remember what I said. Halfway through our call, the conversation shifted into our own experiences of being weird children, and weird adults. We talked about autism. I talked about Judith Butler, whose ideas about self-determination I thought resonated with things Agnes had said, and who Agnes happened to be reading at the time. Same with Foucault. We talked about the tropes of kids' stories and how those have evolved. At the end of an hour nothing concrete was resolved. But Agnes seemed inspired to re-draft.

A week or so later Agnes submitted that draft. Many of the core ideas of the first were preserved, but it was otherwise a very different essay — less personal, more subtle, more academic. Butler and Foucault were both there, along with the likes of Hacking and Ariès. It was one of the few pieces I’ve ever read in which deeper engagement with famously difficult writers actually helped to make a piece more clear. It went on to become one of our best performing essays. What role I played, I have no idea.

I feel mostly the same way about therapy.

There are more obvious ways that the editor is a therapist. Writing is hard, and sage counsel from someone who is accustomed to seeing works in progress can help. But it’s not always instrumental support that matters.

In my 20s, my therapist was an older man who’d dropped out of seminary to get a psychology PhD. Somewhat later in life than is normal, he had developed narcolepsy. He took prescription modafinil and drank diet mountain dew into the evening. He had asked me to wake him up if he ever dozed off. It only ever happened a handful of times, and each instance I’d just say his name loudly. He’d rouse, apologize, and tell me the last thing he remembered hearing.

One night, though, I watched his eyes gradually shut. I stopped speaking mid-sentence. He didn’t respond. Instead of waking him up, for reasons I can’t remember and can’t now explain, I kept talking. For a quarter of an hour I spoke uninterrupted, a stream of consciousness on a topic I also can’t recall. But I do remember the feeling driving home from that session: an unexpected sense of levity, like something had found its place.

All Agnes seemed to need was an audience to listen, to give her, for a few minutes, enough distance to hear herself and her own ideas more clearly. Sometimes, that, too, is the role of the editor. It didn’t necessarily matter what we said back. It may have even been enough to say nothing at all.

1. My friend Sheon, who edited this piece, disagrees.

2. See, for example, Maxwell Perkins, who edited Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Tom Wolfe. He effectively functioned as Fitzgerald’s banker, lawyer, therapist, and friend. In the case of Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, the literary sensation of its day, it was Perkins who personally pared it down four-fold to its final 500 page form.

3. And several dozen that have not, despite our efforts.