THE EDITOR knows best
With a view from both sides of the desk, editor turned novelist Anna Pitoniak offers a unique insight into the mistakes writers make and how to avoid them
Anna Pitoniak
Because I’m an editor by day, and a novelist by night (and by morning, and by weekend), one of the questions I get asked most frequently is: has being an editor made you a better writer?
The short answer is: yes. The slightly longer answer is: yes, absolutely. In fact, for me, working as an editor was the main thing that gave me the courage to tackle writing a book. When I began working at Random House many years ago, I had a simmering desire to write – but I often felt too intimidated and illequipped to try writing an entire novel. I didn’t know where to begin.
As an editor, it is your job to understand why a book works, or why it doesn’t. The book may run as smoothly as a well-oiled sports car by the time a reader has it in her hands, but before it reaches that point, an editor has spent many hours peering under the hood of the machine, looking for problems and possibilities. Once I had got my hands dirty with editing, I felt less intimidated by the prospect of picking up the pen (or turning on the laptop) and starting. I still didn’t know where to begin – but now I knew that didn’t matter. No one really knows where to begin. You just have to start.
That, perhaps, was the biggest lesson I took from my work as an editor. Here are a few more of the things I learned along the way:
Read everything
I was a kid who was always reading. There was nothing that couldn’t be improved by the addition of a book. A long car ride, a wait at the orthodontist’s office – even family meals. When I was little, I would often ask my mom if we could have ‘reading dinner’, which meant we all brought our books to the table instead of talking. It never occurred to me that you wouldn’t want to do this. Why talk when you can read?