[More detail here.]
See?
Miller, I don’t think that’s necessarily fair - did you read On Writing and his latest short story collection, Everything’s Eventual? Very good, very tight. The man is definately ill-served without a serious editor, but when he self-edits, as in when he holds himself to the short-fiction format, he’s still excellent.
I’m a professional editor, but of a business newsletter, not fiction.
However…
I friend of mine recently published a three-volume science fiction novel. As a friend, I was happy to read it, and as an editor I couldn’t help making marginal notes on typos and other errors in the hardbound edition. I passed my notes onto my friend who accepted them with thanks, and incorporated some of them (although not enough, IMHO) into the paperback editions.
Some errors were simple typos that might have been expected in any published work, but in other cases there were errors of fact (e.g. the time it would take a radio message to reach Neptune), or of consistency: the book, set in the far future, used both SAE and metric units of measure. The author explained that certain characters intentionally used the antique SAE units, and I would have accepted this usage, but in fact the book didn’t apply it consistently. There was even a case in which two consecutive sentences mixed miles and kilometers, for no apparent reason.
Elsewhere a conversation lapsed into a script format, with the character name and and a colon preceding each line of dialog, and then back to the standard “he said” format, for no apparent reason. I questioned it, but he had no explanation and didn’t want to change it.
But the biggest fault was this. It was set far, far in the future and had many different classes of lifeforms with complicated names and mental configurations. He had written a long and comprehensive explanation of the history between now and then, and descriptions of the various lifeforms. The book was not written as a three-volume work, and when the decision was made to split into three books, someone decided to to place this very informative and helpful summary as an appendix in the last volume!
I explained to my friend that this had infuriated me, because I had spent a lot of time and effort trying to figure out everything that was so neatly explained in this appendix and that would have been very useful to have when I *started *reading the books. Putting it at the end of the last volume was a very cruel joke to play on the readers, and I still can’t figure out why anyone thought it was a good idea. (I count this as a bad editorial choice.)
As someone who doesn’t write or edit fiction, I chose not to offer any comment on plotting or characters. But even as an informal, limited, unofficial editor, there was a fair amount I could offer the author. It’s just too bad he didn’t choose to take full advantage of my suggestions.
A teacher who was an award-winning magazine writer once told me that you can improve any piece of writing by editing it down.
Case in point: in November I finished a story I’d been working on for months. I sent it in to my editors at roughly 2,000 words longer than they asked for. I was tired of looking at it and didn’t think I could do any more with it. They said “you do it, we don’t want to cut things that are important to you.” By the time I was done with the thing, it was 1,200 words shorter (I wasn’t going to do all their work for them ;)) and much improved. It flowed a lot better without instances of unnecessary wordiness, I found some sentences with extra words I hadn’t removed that were almost incoherent, and plenty of other mistakes. The main thing is that I got to my big points quicker and expressed them better.
When you write a story, you tend to assume that everything you put into it is necessary. It’s not. Also, when you’ve done the background work for a story (research, interviews, creating the characters, whatever), you know lots of background details that explain things- and you may not actually write something that a reader will need to know. Editors can point those things out. Also, sometimes you need a scapegoat. 
Define “editor.”
No professional writer needs an editor to edit his work for flow, storytelling, characterization, etc. And if the book is too long, it just won’t sell. No editor these days goes out and edits a long book down to size, or does any appreciable rewriting. If that’s necessary, your book gets rejected in favor of an author who knows how to do it right.
All writers do need a copyeditor, whose job is to make sure the work is consistent (“On page 5, Dr. Watson had an old war wound in his leg; on page 354, he has it in his shoulder. Which is it?”) and to correct grammar errors and misused words (pure spelling errors are usually caught by the spell check, but using “their” or “there” will not be).
Occasionally, a very successful writer will get wordy or overblown as time goes one. However, do not draw the conclusion that an editor did something to the original work. It’s just the way that the writer evolved.
The idea that a book editor will take a rough but promising manuscript and turn it into gold is pretty much a myth (especially nowadays). She might make suggestions to the author to improve a book that’s already publishable, but she won’t rewrite it.
The mistaken assumption in the OP is that once an author has enough experience, they become the ideal person to sit in judgement of their own work. This just isn’t so. No matter how much you write, you can’t always see your work from an outsider’s eye. Things which you think are witty may actually not be funny, things which you think are original may be tired cliches, and things which you think are surprising may actually be quite predictable. An editor, at the basic level, is simply a person who isn’t the writer, and thus can see the work without the same distortions and prejudices as the person who wrote the book. What Jordan, Turtledove, and other frequent targets of complaints really need is someone to drag them back in touch with reality, someone to tell them what readers actually like reading about.
What they really need is an audience that will stop buying their books until they shape up.
I think Robert Jordan averages like $1m/net or so from each of his books so I can see why the man keeps writing, and after awhile reading his books I felt like the ONLY POSSIBLE POINT to all the BS in his novels is just so he has an excuse to not finish it and write another.
Also what is sad about Jordan is the guy really brought me back into the fantasy genre.
I read fantasy a lot in high school and college but really got out of it after that. I picked up his Wheel of Time series for the first time around when I think the fourth book had just been published.
I literally devoured the first three in a few days and I would have said right then that the Wheel of Time series will be remembered in Sci-Fi/Fantasy fiction as well as Dune or something. I thought at that point it ranked up there in the top 1-3 fantasy series I had ever read.
But unfortunately the rest of the series sucked hard and sucked often.
I’m being overly critical, because all of the following books do have some interesting plot twists and developments, as well as a generally interesting story but it all basically just becomes “too much” and gets bogged down.
I’d say my favorite current author is probably Mercedes Lackey. I’d long heard of her but was fairly uninterested in her works, I ended up reading the Herald-Mage trilogy recently and then subsequently read like 5 of her books and I really like what she does.
And then went to the hospital?
I am a professional editor (by day) and author (by night), and by professional I mean I get paid to do both things. (Not nearly enough but that’s another story.)
As a professional editor I don’t really edit. The place I work does scholarly journals and books–I am listed as the “production editor” on one journal and the “editor” on another, but the expert editorial board makes all decisions on the content. I just fix the grammar and punctuation, do the layout, send proofs out to the authors and editorial board, and then bug them when they haven’t returned them. My comments run to “need pinpoint cite here” and “this contradicts what was in paragraph 6 above–explain & resolve?”. Or a name is spelled two different ways. Technically I am not supposed to, ahem, waste my time checking it but send it back to the author. On the books, occasionally we get one that for one reason or another needs a thorough edit, and I love that. But usually it’s just spelling, punctuation, consistency of things like page numbering and running heads. The official line on the books we don’t edit is that if we see something while going through checking the running heads we can query the author or fix it if we KNOW how to fix it. Despite the fact that we aren’t supposed to edit, I’ve gotten letters from authors saying I am the best editor they ever had (because I did nothing?).
As a professional author what my editor does for me is, well, first of all, she bought my book. She doesn’t do actual editing–usually a line or two per book. She has removed a couple of bad puns and made me use a fake car dealership instead of John Elway, even though nothing really bad happened at the fake car dealership. She’s the coordinator of all promotional stuff done for my book, if there is any (this would be sending review copies, etc.). She also sends my book out to a copy editor, who is a freelance person and not on staff at Random House. This person is an extremely picky, extremely detail-oriented, totally anal person who has been known to break down my book scene-by-scene to reveal weaknesses. She doesn’t offer a fix, just notes the weaknesses. She’s usually right.
She also makes a few mistakes and changes things I don’t want changed, which is fine because I’m the author and I can overrule her. (This is to say, I can overrule the copy editor. I can also fight with the acquiring editor but that doesn’t seem like a real good idea.)
Even though I myself am an awfully good copy editor, there are things that I just don’t notice in my own books–although I have been told they were in great shape. (In the first paragraph of a four-page single-spaced letter detailing what’s wrong with the book!)
Then don’t editors do the wooing of desirable talent? You know, wine and dine them and say things like, “Orderly House is the place for you, because we’ll give your book the push it needs”?
My favorite fiction author is Kurt Vonnegut. Can you imagine trying to edit anything beyond spelling, punctuation and grammar for, say, ‘The Breakfast of Champions?’ I certainly can’t. Maybe it just depend on the style of writing.
Or “depends”, as the case may be.
Because of COURSE I’m going to make an obvious error in a thread about the need for editors…
Those are “acquisitions editors,” or “bait.” They rarely do the hands-on editing. Nowadays, most publishers only seem to have acquisitions editors and Spell-Check. Everything else, they farm out to freelancers.
Do you mean John Elway**'s**? Because that changes the whole meaning of the sentence…
Not trying to be a smart-ass, but when I read that, my first reaction was “For what? Throwing a hail Mary pass?”
:smack: see what I mean about self-editing? Woulda changed that in anyone else’s copy.
Uh, actually, and then the previous post got away from me (preview, not submit). The actual name I had used was John Elway Everycar. The actual names are, for instance, John Elway Ford . . . and so forth. So I had to change it to MadeUp Name Everycar.
But that was good, because I was then free to make MadeUp Name into a coke-snorting rabble-rousing bad guy.
FYI - you’re going to hate her in a little while. I suggest reading her books chronologically in publication order so you can know which ones to not bother with; she goes downhill sometime in the 90’s as I recall. Now she’s one of those people I see their hardbacks at Barnes and Noble and say “They’re still writing? People are still shelling out?!” Unfortunately this is often said about the entirety of the “new speculative fiction hardbacks” section.
Well I boiled them first so a lot of the glue and such wasn’t on them, and they were all 3 paperbacks so they digested fairly well.