What Does an Editor Do?

Editing is hard work and it doesn’t pay that well. Luckily, people buy me breakfast just to get me to tell how I repeatedly enter into secret and sometimes risky relationships with writers.
I say secret because the rule is client privacy for the writers I work with. And I say risky because, once I enter a writer’s creative space and muck about, things do not always go as planned.
When someone asks to hear my editing stories, often it is because he or she has been thinking about retiring from a day job with full benefits to enter what is generally believed to be the lucrative world of editing. For a six-dollar plate of huevos rancheros and a coffee, these hopefuls learn it ain’t necessarily so.
On the surface, each editing job looks similar — someone has written a book and wants me to praise what is good and help fix what is bad. Sometimes that is exactly how it goes. I find myself donning the caps of the psychologist, cheerleader, story critic, and grammarian. I do my work, the writer does his, the book is published, and we all live happily every after.
Often, however, the editing process leads to a brick wall. And every time I think I know where all those brick walls are, a new one pops up. Even for someone who knows plenty about great prose, structure, compelling characters, punctuation, and the difference between a transitive and an intransitive verb, editing is not easy money. Why not? Because each editing job also involves interacting with a human being who, understandably, thinks of his or her manuscript as a newborn babe. Visualize asking a new parent to lop off his baby’s nose. It is not easy.