Editing: Finding the best editor for your manuscript

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31 January 2025
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Debut novelist Rosaria Giorgi describes navigating the editorial maze before finding an editor who understood her book

When the time came to choose an editor to review my manuscript – allowing someone into the early drafts of my creations and trusting them with my raw, unpolished words – I felt a deep sense of vulnerability.

This is probably why my first choice fell on an old teacher of mine. Although he had only taught me briefly in a creative writing class, the generosity he had shown with his time and expertise had made a lasting impression on me. Additionally, the fact that he was the published author of several thrillers convinced me that he could easily relate to the essence of my novel. I reached out to him, and he suggested an initial assessment of my outline.

It went downhill from there.

My novel, The Less Unkind, centers on Pico, a young student with a talent for solving riddles. While investigating a sudden disappearance, she gets caught in the crosshairs of an obsessive art collector, a police murder investigation and a Mafia-sanctioned vendetta. Pico’s main power lies in the strength of her intellect and the friendships she forges along her coming-of-age journey – none more significant than her bond with Leo, her best friend.

My editor was concerned about the relationship between Pico and Leo. “Does Leo fancy her?” he asked. I explained that no, but he should read the manuscript to get the sense of how that friendship moves the story along. As I had envisaged them as just friends, I intended to stay firm in my decision that Pico and Leo would not fall in love – or in bed.

The editor did not agree. “So, is Leo gay? Because without romantic entanglements, you reduce the stakes.” And with that verdict, he moved on to my story’s “next existentialist threat” (his words)—the lack of physical violence and its counterpart, physical strength. With his taste for punch-ups of one sort or another, was the editor trying to rewrite my story into the one he wanted to read?

I couldn’t shake the feeling that what really bothered him was that my book didn’t fit the mould. A young female as the hero of a crime story? The book’s insistence on intellectual strengths and the power of relationships rather than pugilism? Was misogyny at play?

Although he did not charge me for his time, it was a frustrating experience, and it stung. I felt my creative vision had been overshadowed by the editor’s myopic genre-specific expectations.

In search of a new editor, I found someone who had written extensively about his editing approach and had many years of experience in North America. I had some reservations though, since my story was set in several European countries in 1994. Nevertheless, impressed by his credentials, I hired him.

He read the manuscript meticulously. When his assessment came, it was thorough, with suggestions for rewrites, pruning and reshuffles. It was however feedback for a different book. Grappling with the unfamiliar locations, cultural mores and social norms depicted in the novel, he had set out to change them all and, in the process, had taken away the book’s European flavour. More insulting, though, was the cultural arrogance: he questioned Pico’s attitudes, lifestyle and cultural references, which were based on my own experience as an Italian young woman in 1994.

The proverbial third time lucky struck for me when I met an editor who was receptive to both the cultural cues and contextual layers in my book. As importantly, his lack of vanity had been absent in the previous two editors. Showing genuine respect for the story I wanted to tell, this editor focused on how it was told, striving to make it the best possible version of itself - for the reader.

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Among the many valuable suggestions I received, was finding a more fitting title. Transforming the original title, Constant Friends, into something more ominous and mysterious that better captured the novel’s tone and mood, instantly elevated the book. As a bookshop owner noted upon hearing the new title, ‘It makes you stop and ponder what it’s all about. That’s intriguing, and I like it.’

The Less Unkind by Rosaria Giorgi is her debut novel (£19.99)

 

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