… A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
– William Butler Yeats, Adam’s Curse

Maybe there are writers who can produce perfect sentences effortlessly; I’ve never met any and hope I never will. The best, most professional writers tend to do a lot of revising — and almost all benefit from having someone cast a cold eye on their work.

In other words, from editing and being edited.

Credentials

My first editorial job was at Plenum, where I worked on Russian-language publications like “Magnetohydrodynamics” and “The Journal of Metallurgy.” Once you’ve tackled badly translated Soviet-era science, you can pretty much handle any subject. I then retreated to graduate school, which led to my editing The Collected Poems of Paul Blackburn and Selected Poems of Paul Blackburn.

Then, in the mid-1980s, I stumbled into travel publishing. I worked for Frommer’s, Rough Guides, and Fodor’s, doing everything from copy-editing and British-to-American translating to line editing and
project developing. For example, I was the first series editor for the Paris-based Gault-Millau restaurant guides at Frommer’s, and oversaw the creation of the Wall Street Journal Guides to Business Travel at Fodor’s.

Since moving to Tucson in 1992, I’ve worked on numerous freelance editing projects, including guidebooks, cookbooks, short stories…you name it. Editing other people’s work provides a nice break from the torments of doing my own writing.