To the Editor

Ray Banks rails against Anne Rice's repudiation of editors. Rice, claiming to be very demanding of herself, has come to believe she can produce better work alone than if she teamed with an editor.

I've revised this entry several times now, trying to get past my emotional reactions as both a writer and an editor, to plain facts:

An editor is a writer's first formal audience. The writer is too close to the work, and friends and family are too close to the writer. An editor is a good representation of what strangers (a.k.a. the general public) will think. An editor will make comments which any writer, status aside, has the right to take or leave.

What are editors ultimately good for? Credibility. In the age of self-publishing, the presence of an editor signals readers that an author's ego hasn't gone unchecked, that the read might be worth their time, that at least one person besides the author approves the work.

The editor takes as much pride in editing as the writer does in writing, yet in the end, the editor yields the spotlight to the writer and the work.