“The mutually enriching relationship between writer and editor is one of the very best reasons to put a new blank page into the typewriter (as it were) and to fill it with words. The writing process may be the joy of solitude, but the editing process is the satisfaction of teamwork.”

– Amanda Le Rougetel, Nonfiction Writer 

In March 2026, I took on a work placement at Luath Press. Ever prone to fantasy and its adjacent genres, I chose to work on a magical realism manuscript telling a coming-of-age story steeped in Scottish folklore. The author was award-winning, his credentials well-known and his expertise in the subject untouchable — and yet, while I read, I felt a very peculiar nervousness creep over me. I had no idea what he was talking about.

I wrote notes on each chapter, kept a list of characters, wrote summaries — but the author’s intent was beyond my understanding. I can help when the grammar is unclear, the sentence oddly phrased or the structure confusing, but how does an editor edit something they don’t understand? His prose was beautiful and his expertise in folklore was self-evident, but when it came time to comment on the plot or the pacing, I felt worse than at a loss. I felt irrelevant. 

I just wasn’t the target audience. Maybe the best I could do for the reader, as an editor, was to make my copy and line-edits, stand back — like I’d just tinkered with alien machinery — and let the reader interpret it as I did, without my meddling. Unfortunately, as a publisher, my job couldn’t end there. Marketing, advertising, event-planning and designing all require certainty, concrete material to use in a blurb, an A.I. sheet, a press release, flyers… I needed to find certainty somewhere in that book, something I could pin to its commercial identity like a butterfly to a display-case. But, again, its brilliance was in being so ethereal — so I was stuck.

This placement was focused on teaching us independent working skills. We were meant to problem-solve and discover solutions to problems on our own, but I could not help, as I worked, to keep thinking back to something I had always considered a fundamental part of the editor’s role — communication. HarperCollins defines an editor as ‘work[ing] closely with authors, […] helping authors develop their ideas…’ Authors like Rebecca Weinrich Wheeler or Amanda Le Rougetel, quoted above, laud the editor-author relationship as fundamental to their process, built on ‘respect[ing] each other’s expertise and passion.’ And though I have had editing experience in the past, this was my first editing project that took place without that relationship, and taught me how invaluable it can be.

Communication will always help with the editing process itself, but its true value is in focusing all composite parts of the experience into something the market can read. As it stands, I found my own way of completing my tasks alone; my appreciation for the authenticity of the author’s prose and the way he’d unwittingly ensnared me and caused me to reflect on myself had turned to a slow-growing affection. There was no more certain praise to give it, in the end, then to call it “blurry, distinct, and hypnotic, all at once.”