Editing Principle 21: It Matters

Three unrelated quotes that nonetheless gel:

From the announcement of Triple Canopy’s launch of TC Labs: “Text is not filler, and it is too often treated as such.”

“There are many things a storyteller must add and subtract to tell a good story.” —Lorrie Moore

“There are people whose interests and affections lie in the world of personality, to whom the whole of life is made up of people. Mrs. Alice Freeman Palmer (whom I never met) was such a woman. Not thoughts, not idea, not religions, but people made the universe for her; and this gave her incommunicable, unimaginable access to people’s hearts. She held the keys of them, —thousands of keys to thousands of individuals, —and they each felt themselves to be understood when they met her; they felt as it were, in contact with the power that made them.” —John Jay Chapman on first female college president Alice Freeman Palmer

Editing matters because text is not filler, because good texts require rounds of adding and subtracting, and because editing not only shapes texts so that they’re more readily understood (by strangers), it’s also the experience of having one’s work understood and interrogated (by your editor) on a level rarely encountered on a daily basis, on a level that feels a few small degrees off spiritual. Real developmental editing cannot be done via algorithm and does not scale. It’s slow, inefficient and thus — in this era — practically radical.