The Holy Art of the Edit

Some spiritual lessons from unseen work

‘To write is human, to edit is divine.’ - Stephen King

When it comes to the life of our favorite literature—the process by which it reaches
our shelves and our souls—there are forces at work that are easy to overlook but
whose absence would impoverish us all. There is, of course, the writer: the much
loved and highly visible figure who has been to the mountain and can tell us a tale. We
cloak this person in all kinds of myths and fables, most of them centering around
solitude and singularity of thought and purpose—the lone seer who cuts a track for us through this weary world. We praise the writer for the work we hold in our hands and our hearts, we travel miles to listen to them read their work and sign our books, and we develop a kind of brand loyalty to a select band of men and women whose works carry most worth for us.

All of this is good and appropriate in its place, but what of other figures whose work
brings literature to life? What other kinds of labor lie behind the stories, poems, and
non-fiction pieces that so enrich our understanding of the world? What kinds of things can be said of them and their endeavors?

In this piece, I want to think about the art of the edit, the work of those whose words grace our pages but whose faces are seldom known to us. Good editors are often the lifeblood of great works, the unseen minds whose influence is felt in some of the best things we enjoy. Celebrating their unseen work is important in itself, but I want to suggest that good editing is not merely a professional practice that we should seek to ‘see’ when we consume literature but that the work of the editor is suggestive of some bigger Christian values and virtues as well.

Editing and the Creation Process

As Christians, we tend to be big fans of ex nihilo—it’s how everything got started back in the beginning, and we love to perpetuate it in the media we enjoy. The flash-bang of Genesis chapter one is pretty stirring stuff; the abject nothingness of no-time and no-space somehow springs into dimension and linear process, an event of such singularity and brilliance that science is still listening to its echo. Paul Simon once wrote that ‘the universe loves a drama’, and there is no greater stage for this to be played out on than the cosmology of the Bible. Nothing, and then everything, is quite the curve, and it is exciting to ride it.

The sequence of ‘let there be’ statements on God’s part and his ‘seeing that it was good’ are thrilling to read and just as exciting to replicate. We tend to love the idea of originality, regardless of our discipline. The novel novelist who reinvents the form, the artistic movement that changes how we see, the golden era of drama that recharges comedy and tragedy in ways never thought of before - these are just a few of our favorite things. We reserve words like ‘derivative’ for those works that take existing forms and refine them, and we seldom feel excited about such fine-tuning and iterative work.

This is a shame, as ‘brand new’ is only part of the creation story. Genesis 1:1 gives us the blueprint for what the earliest chapters of the Bible’s first book will contain, but verse 2 provides us with a scheme of work. Raw materials are carved and crafted, edited and augmented, developed and brooded over by God. There is deliberation and derivation, with the material resources of the world pre-programmed to develop and adapt with use and exposure. Here, we feel the full weight of Trinitarian creativity: the Father ordaining, the Son realizing, and the Holy Spirit editing and adapting.

We are fond of routinely reminding ourselves and others that we create as part of our image-bearing capacities. But what of editing? The cultivation and improvement of already-existing reality is part of the joy of the godhead and, as a result, at least part of our job. The unseen hand and unheard voice of the editor are not ‘necessary evils’ in an error-ridden world, but essential components of how we reflect our Creator. The woman or man who can receive the words of another and, as an act of creativity, mould and shape them for greater beauty and usefulness is re-sounding a note that is older than Eden - and we should surely celebrate their skills in consequence of that fact. The media image of an editor as an overworked, hard-bitten nag who simply hounds writers over deadlines is a horrible reduction of the God-reflecting ministry of those who can reshape our words and, as a result, our world.

Editing and Christian progress

What is true of the first creation can likewise be said of the new creation that works in the hearts of those who follow Jesus. Coming to faith can be a dramatic affair, a whirlwind in which our whole identity is changed by encountering the Lord Christ. Salvation, however, is not a stationary point in our story; rather, it becomes the story itself.

Becoming more like the Lord Jesus Christ is not an act of beatification in which we at. once find ourselves altogether new people, but a work whereby our hearts are edited and paraphrased and parsed into the gracious grammar of the gospel. Our weaknesses become the material by which the Holy Spirit glorifies the Father and the Son; our strengths are harnessed and repurposed in ways we could never have imagined.

To have one’s writing in the hands of an efficient editor is most often a humbling experience. The raw materials we can produce by ourselves are under the spotlight, our errors of judgment or clumsiness of expression are clear to be seen, and the dead ends we have worked ourselves into become painfully evident. A probative and gracious editor will fearlessly expose such issues in pursuit of an ideal that lies beyond the biased horizon of the original writer. The editor will have principles of publication, reception by the reader, and even the broader rules of what good writing is in view. They will not spare the ego of the author to the detriment of the work but will often redraft and wisely augment what has come from one’s pen originally. This is painful and (literally) mortifying work, but the trajectory that such a painful journey follows almost always results in much stronger and more skillful works of art.

Editors can rest in the reality that the difficult conversations, the copious spilling of red ink, and the demand for redrafting and reworking that are simply a part of their job are not the natural outworking of a critical spirit on their part but an echo of the creative Spirit of God who sees people as they are, but doesn’t leave them that way. The demand for something further, something deeper, something purer that editing seeks to meet is corroborative of the sanctifying processes of God in the lives of people like us.

Conclusion

These are just a couple of the many ways in which editing is a holy art, but they plug the task of redrafting and re-crafting into the mains of God’s original design. Editors are not just auditors of taste and style but image-bearers whose work is reflective of how God molds what is already in existence for his greater glory. In a world of expressive individualism, where our online lives allow us to be the arbitrators of our own creation, the process of editing reminds us of the community element of all creative acts and the collaborative benefit of allowing what we write to fall into others’ hands before it achieves wider distribution.

‘To write is human, to edit is divine’ - editors take heart, writers take note, and readers take time to bless the unseen hands that shape what reaches your heart through the written word.

**A version of this article first appeared on The Rabbit Room poetry stack - before I became a freelance editor! I urge you to enter and enjoy the beautiful world of Rabbits for yourself here.**