22/10/2020 - When To Disregard An Editor’s Advice

One thing I’m still trying to get a handle on is when to disregard an editor’s advice. For my last book, someone recommended that I start the story in the backstory of the characters, which I disregarded because the backstory has nothing really to do with the story. In the two years since that advice, I’ve concluded that it might have been correct, not because it’s necessarily crucial to the story, but because it would have provided a sense of normalcy from which the story would then deviate. This sense of normalcy isn’t 100% necessary but in a fantasy novel it sure helps. It eases the reader in a bit. The problem was the editor didn’t say ‘you should include this because it’s a good idea to start a story like this with a sense of normalcy from which you’ll then deviate’, she just said it’d be nice to see. One thing I’m learning about editors is they often have very good ideas and are completely terrible at expressing why they’re good ideas, so to an author they sound like complete gibberish.

This was why I ended up parting ways with one particular editor, who was a certified genius in some areas, but whenever I queried any of her points, I didn’t get an explanation for why the point was important, I just got told to trust her and/or the process. Being a little older and possibly wiser, this is now a massive red flag to me. Still, even if it was a reasonable thing to say (which it isn’t), it would still be a bad thing for an editor to say. The reason being: Let’s say an editor tells you to change your main character to a llama. This is briliant advice but you don’t know why because the editor won’t tell you. So you go through and make the main character a llama, but the change hasn’t brought about the effect the editor wanted, because she didn’t tell you the function changing the character into a llama was supposed to serve. To put it another way, if you don’t know why you’re changing something, you won’t know what direction to take the new matieral in.