The truth is, you have to learn how to be edited just as much as you have to learn how to edit. And learning how to be edited teaches you a lot about writing, about distance and objectivity and humility, and ultimately about yourself.
In an odd way, the exchange between writer and editor encapsulates the process of growing up. The act of writing is godlike, omnipotent, infantile. Your piece is a statement delivered from on high, a pronouncement ex cathedra, as egotistical and unchecked as the wail of a baby. Then it goes out into the world, to an editor, and the reality principle rears its ugly head. You are forced as a writer to come to terms with the gap between your idea and your execution — and still more deflating, between your idea and what your idea should have been.
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Still, editors and editing will be more important than ever as the Internet age rockets forward. The online world is not just about millions of newborn writers exulting in their powers. It’s also about millions of readers who need to sort through this endless universe and figure out which writers are worth reading. Who is going to sort out the exceptional ones? Editors, of some type. Some smart group of people is going to have to separate the wheat from the chaff. And the more refined that separation process is, the more talent — and perhaps more training — will be required.
We already use other readers to sort things out for us: My bookmarks are mostly referrals from writers I’ve learned to trust. Some utopians may dream that an anarcho-Wikipedia model will prevail, that a vast self-correcting democracy of amateurs will end up pointing readers to
the most worthwhile pieces. But that is only “editing” in its crudest, most general form — it’s really sorting. In the chaotic new online universe, the old-fashioned, elitist, non-democratic system of sorting information will become increasingly important, if only because it enforces a salutary reduction of the sheer mind-swamping number of options available. The real problem is glut, and it’s only going to get worse.
In any case, real editing is something different. It takes place before a piece ever sees the light of day — and it’s this kind of painstaking, word-by-word editing that so much online writing needs. If learning how to be edited is a form of growing up, much of the blogosphere still seems to be in adolescence, loudly affirming its identity and raging against authority. But teenagers eventually realize that authority is not as tyrannical and unhip as they once thought. It’s edited prose, with its points sharpened by another, that will ultimately stand the test of time. There is a place for mayfly commentary, which buzzes about and dies in a day. But we don’t want to
get to the point where the mayflies and mosquitoes are so thick that we can’t breathe or think. ^
This article is worth its weight in gold. An old-school newspaper or book editor had three roles: first, pick the stuff that has the potential to go somewhere. Next, re-arrange it so it makes sense. Finally, the physical role of editing, or making the sentences as clean and efficient as possible and eliminating errors. It’s similar to how writing is first picking a concept, next expressing it well, and finally the mechanical process of writing, whether with pen or keyboard.
[...] are often more like editors than writers, in that we take the words of others, cut out the unnecessary, re-arrange so they can [...]