A Praise Song to Human Editors

Will Chatty GPT ever learn to edit itself?

As I wrote in my last post, AI is extremely chatty. Any writer who’s received one of those spam messages urging you to connect with a famous author or get a book promotion package you never requested, will see that the fulsome praise of your work can take an entire page not to mention minutes of your precious time. Recently, I got an invitation from an AI generated scam focused on editing my published picture book Lucy and Henry Are Twins. The scam email is 144 words longer than the entire text of the book including the title. (How and why I would want to edit a published book is a mystery to me.)

I have been publishing traditionally for (eek) fifty years and through all those decades, I have been both challenged and supported by dedicated editors who love stories and readers, and who have spent their lives making good books better.

I sent my most recent manuscript, the fourth in my series that began with The Castle in the Attic, to Margery, the editor who has worked with me on the series from the beginning and who is a talented and prolific children’s book writer herself.

Margery knows all my quirks and with great patience, she points them out to me every time. She and I both prefer the penciled line edit to a digital program, so here is a sample of one of the more lightly touched pages.

I use the words just and even too often. I repeat words usually in the same paragraph and occasionally, in the same sentence. She cuts my unnecessary explanations, my long descriptive passages, and urges me to replace pronouns with the characters’ names. She is alert to my continuity issues. (Ex. See p. 88, line 8. William knows that Tolliver is not around.)

But more than that, she is attuned to what I’m trying to achieve in the story and how best to help me realize it. As every good editor knows, the way to get a writer back to the page with a sense of energy and excitement is first and foremost to tell them what they are doing right, what in the manuscript is working. I happen to love the revision process because I know it’s my opportunity to get closer to my original vision for the book. Once I’ve taken the time to absorb what she is saying, Margery’s editorial letters always send me back to page one with enthusiasm.

Every experienced writer knows that we are our own worst editors. We fall in love with our characters, our settings, our descriptions and when we type THE END on the bottom of the page/screen, there is a feeling of such joy and achievement that we have little objectivity left. That’s why I try to take weeks if not months away from the book to let it rest. With time off and the help of an editor like Margery, I’m able to see my work more clearly and cut more drastically so that the story moves as swiftly as it needs to do in this age of short attention spans.

Will AI replace the human editor? Many feel it already has, but I’m not one of them. AI is a mathematical tool without conscious awareness, an inner life or lived experience. Those are the qualities I look for in the editor casting her eye and wielding her pencil over my hard won words.

Thanks to Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop for shining her light on “The Good Old Days in Publishing”!

March 3, 2025 1 Comment

The Good Old Days in Publishing

A nostalgic backward look

This is the second of a two part series on publishing before the Internet. You can read Part I here.

I first went to work in publishing five decades ago. It was a move I made consciously in order to understand the inner workings of what was then called Harper and Row (now HarperCollins) because I wanted them to publish my work. I started out as an editorial assistant in the department headed by the legendary Ursula Nordstrom who was a brilliant editor and an author herself. UN, as she was known in the office, took chances on unknown authors such as Maurice Sendak and risky ones like Shel Silverstein. A collection of her letters entitled Dear Genius, edited and annotated by the children’s book historian Leonard Marcus, is a book worth reading for a look back at the way an editor can honor a writer’s work while making suggestions that will improve it. UN knew better than anyone how to get the best work out of a writer.

I’ve just finished reading The Editor by Sara B. Franklin which details the remarkable life of Judith Jones who worked with writers as varied as Julia Childs, John Updike and Anne Tyler. Although her boss at the time did not acknowledge Jones’ discovery, she is finally credited with rescuing The Diary of Anne Frank from the rejection pile. Jones was what has now become a rare bird in book publishing… an editor, like UN, who read carefully, made suggestions for improvements to a manuscript while always acknowledging that the writer was the one who had the final say.

Publishing has changed dramatically since those days. Publishers have consolidated and many of the largest in the US are owned by companies in France, Germany and the UK. Amazon dominates the book selling market and introduced the concept of self-publishing so the number of books published every year has exploded. Authors are often called “content providers,” a chilling term to someone who has lived through the glory days of the industry.

Some examples. I used to get letters acknowledging receipt of my manuscript and written rejection letters when it was turned down.I always received copies of my reviews, both good and bad, from outlets large and small. Reviews were not written by ordinary readers logging on to a website (when I started back in the 1970s, the internet didn’t exist yet, at least for everyday citizens) but by critics in mainstream media outlets. If my book was picked up for a foreign edition or a book club, I got a phone call or at the very least, a letter and later, an email informing me of the rights sale and the terms of the license. When I published a novel, I often received one leather bound edition from the publisher as a present.

One of my publishers gave me the original jacket art from my best-selling children’s book

and another, with the blessing of the illustrator, two pieces of inside art from a picture book.

But the best present of all I found recently in a bureau drawer.

Everybody at Harper Junior Books knew of my affection for Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh. (You can read about the influence that book had on my own writing in this essay I wrote for the 50th Anniversary edition of the novel.) So they gave me a small silver notebook of my own, a place to keep my secrets, the ones that would feed my stories.

They inscribed the back with the date of my departure and HJB for Harper Junior Books.

Afterwards, when I got home, I added the one line I will always remember from Harriet the Spy.

As Harriet’s nanny Ole Golly, tells her young charge: “Gone is gone. Don’t try to hold on to people or lie down in your memories. Make stories from them.”

Sadly, I tell myself the same about the good old days of publishing. Gone is gone.

But I am still making stories.

Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop (www.elizabethwinthropalsop.com) is the author of over 50 works of fiction for adults and children under the pen name Elizabeth Winthrop. These include the award-winning fantasy series, The Castle in the Attic and The Battle for the Castle as well as the short story, The Golden Darters, read on the nationwide radio program, Selected Shorts,and included in Best American Short Story anthology, and Island Justice and In My Mother’s House, two novels now available as eBooks. She is the daughter of the acclaimed journalist, Stewart Alsop. Daughter of Spies: Wartime Secrets, Family Lies, a family history about her parents’ love affair during World War II and their marriage lived in the spotlight of Washington during the 1950s was published by Regal House, October 25, 2022.

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