Line editing involves taking an existing piece of writing and reworking it, line by line, to make a better piece of writing. Sometimes this involves making or merging paragraphs, restructuring arguments, or even cutting out sections that are redundant or off topic.
Most of my career has been spent in technical areas, and my editing has followed pace with this. As of this writing, I’ve edited more than 10,000,000 words written by other people, including thousands of articles and a number of novels and textbooks.
There’s a tranquility that I get from line editing. Deciding on the perfect word–if one exists–to describe a certain phenomenon creates a visceral satisfaction. Moving descriptive phrases nearer to their referents makes an obvious difference in clarity. In editing academic and technical works, the primary goal is clarity: better a boring work than an incomprehensible one.
But I’ve found that this relentless push toward clarity has helped me in my own creative writing, as well. I notice more easily when pronouns are ambiguous. This can be a particular issue in scenes where multiple characters who have the same pronoun are talking with each other and about each other. Consider the sentence, “He said if I visit him before work that I can borrow his car.” Without context, we don’t know who is being visited and whose car is being borrowed. These might be the same person, or it might be two distinct people. Because people actually talk this way, it’s more genuine to include such dialogue (where it would occur) than to have characters speak in grammatically convenient ways, and line editing has given me the tools to keep that sentence and work around it to clarify.
This type of situation, where some parts must be kept as they are despite ambiguity, comes up a lot in academic editing.
The other way that line editing has helped me become a better writer is that in academic writing (in particular), the argument is more important than anything else. For fiction, the story is paramount, in my opinion. When I was younger, before I had spent years of my life editing from the level of “can I tell what this paper is about” down to the level of “en-dash or em-dash here?” (it depends on which country’s dialect is being used), I tried writing novels in florid, vibrant language. Or, at least, language that I thought was florid and vibrant. At times, it was just full of big words that substituted for motion in the story.
Not all motion needs to be action. I have scenes in which the only action is that a person stands in line waiting. In these scenes, though, I can reveal backstory, or personality, or make observations that will be useful in future scenes. And I could do so in simple words.
I love the occasional big word: they sparkle like sequins on a prom dress. But beneath all of the sequins, there must be some fabric to hold the whole thing together. Editing has taught me a lot about story, about building a strong structure, and putting the fancy bits on only once the foundation is solid.
Of course, I also write poetry. So if I happen to include some extra fancy bits because they happen to delight me and then find I can’t use them after all, they can become the germ of a poem.
In poetry, too, line editing skills are useful. While not the typical kind of job, at times I was asked to “trim the abstract to be within the guidelines”. “No problem!” I’d think. And then I’d open the document and see a 900-word abstract and a 300-word limit. Editing taught me to get out the axe first. The scalpel comes later. I find poetry much the same, and if you could see my drafts you’d probably see it, too. Many of my published poems began as flash fiction before being cut and ground a polished until only verse remained.
In short (too late!), line editing has taught me to work across scales, from the large sweeping changes of moving (or removing) whole scenes/sections to the Joycean sweating of where, and whether, to place a comma.