I have a confession to make: I feel like a total fraud when I talk about what it is to be a writer because 95% of my working life is taken up with being an editor. The writing bit gets squeezed into odd-shaped corners like evenings and weekends, until I have that two-weeks-before-deadline panic and stay home from my day-job flinging my fingers at my keyboard until I have 80,000 words down, hoping they are more or less the right words, more or less in the right order. I have three books published under my own name and another one in gestation (but please can we not talk about it right now because the nearness – okay, the pastness – of the deadline makes me cry). Sometimes I’m a little bit proud of them, sometimes I open one quickly and cringe at the clumsiness of my prose, and sometimes I forget I ever wrote them. As my friend and co-worker Alex says, I have the sin of no pride.
But as an editor, I cannot pass a bookstore without going in to view my precious babies, and saying to my long-suffering companion, Look, I edited that series and that one and this one over here and oh dear they don’t have any of that series but they’ve got this one which is great… I have lost count of the number of books I have edited (close to one hundred Animal Arks alone, which means there isn’t a creature on the planet that I haven’t injured, abandoned or endangered in some way). I have worked on all age ranges, from Rainbow Magic by Daisy Meadows which is aimed at first chapter book readers (4 to 7 years) to Warriors by Erin Hunter which falls into the 10+ bracket. I’m also lucky enough to have experienced pretty much every kind of genre (except horror, which is about to change because I’ve just landed my first 9-12 out-and-out scary project for boys), from fairies and fantasy to medieval detective adventures. So I thought I could offer a few tips on how to get the most from your editor, who will become one of the most important people in your life from the moment you sign the contract. At least, I hope that’s how my authors view me…
Firstly, all writers need editors. Even writers who are editors by day. Like me. [Read more…]
