Stereotypes would tell you that author-editor relationships are inherently fraught with tension: the editor attacks the page with a red pen, the author won’t let the editor change a single punctuation mark, or both. Yet editors and authors don’t have to (and shouldn’t!) be antagonists. An editor is their author’s ally—sometimes challenging them, it’s true, but only to support their goal of making their manuscript all that it can be.
After all, conflict may be the heart of plot, but in real life, we want our relationships to look less like Freytag’s Pyramid and more like a flat line.
For independent authors, hiring and working with an editor for the first time can be pretty stressful. As an editor, I do my best to make things easy on my authors as they undertake their writing adventure. But it takes authors and editors working in partnership to follow the smoothest path all the way to the end of the editing journey.
INCITING INCIDENTS
For the author-editor
