Is Line Editing a Lost Art?

In my career as a technical writer, I've had to do a lot of editing; probably half my job was editing material submitted to me by developers and other subject matter experts. But the editing was largely copy editing, not really substantive structural editing. In fiction, that's the purview of the line editor, a somewhat misleading term.

This article explores the role of the line editor in modern fiction, and it turns out to be an important one. Unfortunately, it also seems to be a dying art, as modern publishers downsize and merge.

The truth—and the history—is complicated. Science fiction writer Samuel Delany has reflected that in a career that started in 1962 and spans to the present, he has only had one true line editor for fiction, Ron Drummond. Delany thinks the “marathon reading” done by acquisitions editors “tends to blunt just those finer sensibilities needed to get inside a text and take it apart from within in order to make useful suggestions for improvement that the writer can hear and respond too.” The mode of acquisition is one of decision: this book works, it will sell. For Delany, that mode is similar to a writing workshop style of criticism, which will “list toward the generalized and effect-oriented, rather than toward the specific and causally sensitive.” These criticisms are not invalid, but they “refer to a memory of the text, not the actual experience of reading the text—which is what the writer, writing, is always more or less skillfully modulating and manipulating.”