What Editing Other People’s Books Taught Me About Writing My Own
Seventeen years editing other people’s books. Now I’m the author.
I’ve spent my career on one side of the desk — reading someone else’s manuscript, asking the hard questions, holding the standard while supporting the writer behind the work. This month, with my own book submitted to Routledge, I’m sitting where my clients usually sit. And it has been humbling in the best way. Patience, patience, patience.
I knew, intellectually, how vulnerable it feels to hand your pages to someone else. Now I know it in a lived way — phenomenologically, you might say. The second-guessing. The urge to keep tinkering. The hope that the care you poured into the book actually shows on the page.
Strangely, it has already made me a better editor. When I tell a client “this is good, and here’s where it can be stronger,” I mean both halves more than I ever have — because I am living the same sentence from the receiving end. I know now, in my body, what it takes to cultivate a spirit of revision, so the trap of perfection can never quite close in.
“Revision IS writing.”
One of my earliest mentors once wrote a single line in the margin of a paper I submitted in 2006. I have never forgotten it:
“Be aware of the self-limiting ideas of perfection, and just write.”
I have carried that line into every manuscript I have edited and every writer I have coached since. It is, quietly, the most important editing advice I know — because perfection is not rigor. Rigor is a process: draft, feedback, revision, and the slow, collaborative honing of an idea until it is clear and true. Perfectionism is a stall dressed up as a standard. It tells you the work is not ready to be seen, which usually means you are not ready to be seen. And a manuscript that is never seen is never published.
So if you are the one waiting on feedback right now — on a dissertation chapter, an article under review, a proposal sitting in an editor’s inbox — the silence is not a verdict. And when the response does come, and it asks for revisions, or raises questions, or lands a peer review that stings, that is not failure either. That is the patience of publishing working.
Let go of perfection and just write. Revise as needed. Keep honing the piece collaboratively, with people who want it to succeed. Do that, and it will become what it needs to be —
“Published, and in the world.”
That is the patience of publishing. Not only waiting, but being slowly, carefully joined by other people — an editor, a reviewer, a mentor’s twenty-year-old margin note — who help your work arrive.
— If you’re working on a dissertation, an article, or a book and the revision process feels heavy to carry alone, that’s exactly what I do.
Following the journey? Subscribe for more academic publishing insights.