A reader of this blog wrote and asked if I'd heard the NPR interview with Prof. Kathryn Sutherland by Mary Louise Kelly on 10/27/10 about Jane Austin and her editor.  I had, and oddly I had just written a piece about it for A Year of Writing Dangerously - Here it is:

Jane Austen’s brother claimed that “Everything came finished from her pen.” That’s pretty much how we imagine all wonderful writers do it – their work flows directly, easily, happily, finished, from their pen or computers to pristine manuscript pages to their published books. However this is not true of any of the writers I know personally and apparently was not true of Jane Austen either. A professor at Oxford University discovered that Austin’s handwritten pages were a mess, with grammatical errors, omissions and often non-existent punctuation.  What she had was a very good editor.

A good editor is right up there with God as your co-pilot. A good editor can envision your work going further than you ever imagined. A good editor keeps you from making ghastly mistakes in judgment and in grammar. A good editor makes you think whatever changes are made were all your idea.

A bad editor will change the sound of your voice on the page; a good one will help you find it.

                       *       *      *        *        *

And speaking of good editors, my editor at New World Library, the wonderful Jason Gardner, who edited Courage & Craft and the about to be published CHERISHED: 21 Writers on Animals They Have Loved & Lost, bought A Year of Writing Dangerously this week.