The benefits — and costs — of winning an argument with your editor

Editors often ask writers to do things they’d rather not do.

I once edited a book for a brilliant thinker. He’d written the book stream of consciousness. It was full of great insights as well as infuriating, distracting, and self-serving asides. I found that if we deleted the asides, the rest was great — so I edited the book, and he accepted all of my edits.

Except one.

“Is it okay if I don’t delete this?”, he asked. “I’d really like to keep this part.”

I was surprised to hear him say this, because it meant that this brilliant thinker had outsourced his judgment to me, and was now asking for permission to put his own prose in his own book.

So I reminded him that it was his book, what was in it was ultimately up to him, and he could respond to my suggestions in any way he wanted. And I told him the reasons why I had made that particular edit and how strongly I felt about it (in that case, not that strongly), so he should keep it if he wanted.

When you should reject an editor’s suggestions

If you feel you’ve lost ownership of your own book, that’s a disaster. Unless you love what you’re writing, the book will suffer. You’ll start not to really care. And unless you really care, the result won’t reflect your own ideas and your passion to connect with readers.

So, as with my my brilliant author’s book, you are allowed to reject your editor’s suggestions. In fact, in cases where you are sure you’re right about what’s best for the book, you must reject those suggestions.

But before you do so, ask a few questions.

• Why did the editor make this change? (As an editor, I generally provide justifications for my edits in comments. If your editor hasn’t, ask them.)
• Do I agree with the reason? Potential reasons for an edit include violating grammatical rules, factual errors, lack of clarity, repetition, using a word with a misleading connotation, assuming knowledge that readers may not have, inconsistency with the rest of the book, and many other potential justifications. If you disagree with an edit and want to create your own grammar rules, that’s probably a mistake. But if you disagree about whether a passage is helping, or whether part of the text must be reorganized, your own judgment might be better. It’s up to you.
• If you make this change, what other changes need to be made in the manuscript to keep it consistent? Everything in a manuscript is connected, so some changes will generate ripples that affect many more places in the text.
• If the change is important and you’re not sure what’s best, are there others whose opinions you could check with? In a recent manuscript I was editing, an author who taught the topic in a graduate class and I disagreed on which words to use for a key term. She put both alternatives in front of her class in as unbiased a way as possible and asked them to discuss and vote. They preferred her choice, so that’s what we’ll be using.

A deeper question about you and your editor

If you and your editor disagree all the time — and assuming you’re not an arrogant ass who can’t take feedback — then you may not have the right editor.

Look carefully at the character of your disagreements with the editor. If you and the editor can have a principled discussion about the alternatives, that is a relationship that is working. The editor will be teaching you about what works and doesn’t work in a book, and you will be teaching them what is and isn’t important in your content. There’s always a best way to solve those conflicts, and you’ll be working towards those solutions together.

But if you find yourself just getting angry at edits made for what seem like stupid reasons, it may be time to make a change.

This is one reason why it’s often helpful to have the editor edit a sample chapter, to see if the relationship is going to be productive.

Great writers love their editors, even when those editors are hard on the prose. Because in the end, that’s part of the process to make books the best they can be.