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.