By Lisabet Sarai

In addition to writing erotica and erotic romance, I’m also an editor. Over the past decade and a half, I’ve edited three multi-author anthologies, two commercial (Sacred Exchange and Cream) and one for charity (Coming Together: In Vein). As editor of the Coming Together Presents series, I’ve also been responsible for shepherding six collections of short stories by single authors into publication. Right now I’m working with Daddy X (whom many of you will know from ERWA Storytime and Writers) to help him put together his full-length volume The Gonzo Collection, to be released by Excessica in April.

Writing and publishing is hard work. From researching obscure details to wrestling the recalcitrant muse, endless self-promoting to surviving snarky reviews, being an author is not for sissies. You need the energy of teenager, the thick skin of a water buffalo and the self-discipline of a saint.

Sometimes, though, I think that the editor role is even more difficult. If a book you write sucks, that reflects on you alone. When you’re the editor, on the other hand, you hold the fate of others in your hands. It’s not just your own reputation that’s on the line. Your colleagues depend on you to polish their work and make it shine. If the book crashes and burns—gets horrible reviews, or turns out to be full of errors—you take the authors down with you. That’s a heavy responsibility to bear.

Hence I have to be far more careful editing others’ work than self-editing my own. After all, I can rely on my editor to catch those typos or repeated words or slips in logic that I don’t see no matter how many times I review my manuscript. When I’m the editor, there’s no backup. If I miss some mistake, nobody else is going to find it—except, of course, critical readers.

The trickiest part of editing is keeping a light touch. The utmost delicacy is required. Sometimes I want to suggest significant revisions, to improve clarity or flow, to tighten a description or enliven some dialogue. I have to hold myself in check, recognizing that every author tells a story differently. There’s a very real danger in editing—especially when the editor is also an writer—that revisions will dilute the author’s distinctive voice. Some changes I could recommend might improve the work from a technical perspective but do violence to the author’s characteristic style. There’s a constant temptation to impose my own vision on the manuscript, especially when the author’s approach to structure, language and punctuation differ from my own.

I hope Daddy X won’t mind me using his work as an example. I love the boundless sexual enthusiasm in his stories, the wacky scenarios, his over-the-top descriptions and his sly humor. At the same time, his prose tends to have less continuity than mine. Where I’d put in a scene break or an explicit bridging paragraph, he’ll jump from one outrageous set of events to another without batting an eyelash. He also tends to make far heavier use of dialect than I’d feel comfortable with. And he seems to adore ellipsis and interrupted speech. It’s rare for his characters to get out a full sentence that doesn’t include an em dash or two.

If this were my book, I’d strip out eighty percent of the ellipses. I’d avoid using “ain’t”. I’d add transitional paragraphs to clarify the shifts in point of view, and I’d never have a character emit vocalizations like “Anh” or “Ooooowee!” or “Ogeg.”

But it’s not my book. It’s Daddy’s book, Daddy’s stories. If I were to set my red pen loose the way I would on a student term paper, that might stop being true. The resulting book would be more correct, grammatically. It might be easier to read. It would certainly be more conventional. My heavy-handed editing process, though, might well extinguish the spark that makes Daddy X’s work special.

I’m picking on the current book because it’s fresh in my mind, but I’ve felt the same tension in all my professional editing work. I have to constantly remind myself that there’s no one “right” way to write. My job as editor is to refine the raw material of the author’s initial draft without reshaping it too much. Preserving the author’s distinctive voice is as important as fixing his or her grammar.

I know from working with some of my own editors how hard they sometimes push for changes that I think are wrong. The authors with whom I work know they can always push back—that almost every change I make should be viewed as suggested rather than absolutely required. I hope they feel free to debate those suggestions, or simply reject them, if they think those revisions weaken the story they’re trying to tell.

In the end, my name will be on the final result, but I don’t want anyone to pick up the book and think “Gee, this sounds a lot like Lisabet’s prose.” That would indicate a utter and complete failure.