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Editors have a few inside jokes that are probably funny only to us. There’s of course some variety of the “Oxford commas matter!” trope, where a missing comma can vastly change a sentence’s meaning. You may know some of the most famous examples:

• “This book is dedicated to my parents, the Pope and Mother Teresa.”
• “We invited the strippers, JFK and Stalin.”
• “Among those interviewed were Merle Haggard’s two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall.”
• “The highlights of his global tour included encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector.”

Then there’s our childish glee in recalling delightful dangling or misplaced modifiers:

• “As a doctor, your dog seems very healthy.”
• “On the floor was a giant baby’s rattle.”
• “Driving to work, a squirrel raced across the road and right into a tree.”
• “Once they were dead, my sisters threw the plants away.”

And don’t even get me started on the knee-slappers of ads, billboards, and newspaper headlines with misused grammar or spelling that makes editors both cringe and dissolve into fits of giggling:

• “Making Lives Better Everyday.”
• “Woah, that’s savings!”
• “Kids make nutritious snacks.”
• “Police Help Dog Bite Victim.”

If you have to explain these to someone then they aren’t funny—IYKYK—and quite frankly few in our lives find morsels like this as entertaining as we do, which is why editors’ watercooler talk can descend into this kind of arcane in-talk.

Oh, my GOSH, are we fun at parties!

And right around this time of year, it used to be that you could find editors, agents, and publishers dropping another inside-baseball (or publishing, I suppose) remark: some variation of quip about the avalanche of inquiries and submissions in their slush piles in the immediate aftermath of National Novel Writing Month in its heyday.

A quick refresher, in case you aren’t familiar with NaNoWriMo: Every November authors joined the challenge to write 50K words throughout the month. It started as a way to jump-start writers in creating a first draft of a manuscript—to give them some structure and motivation and support to get words on the page, which can often be the biggest hurdle to writing.

NaNo is dead now, but perhaps like a phantom limb, this time of year I still tend to get a lot of inquiries about working with an author on a relatively freshly minted manuscript.

Which often leads to one of my least favorite parts of my job: Returning a “no bid” with their sample edit: as gently as possible suggesting that this may not be the most productive time for the author to work with a professional editor on the manuscript.

The Author’s Job versus the Editor’s

The problem is that as good and promising as an author’s earlier drafts may be, it’s almost a certainty that they’re not yet fully developed and not ready for a professional edit or, even more, submission to agents or publishers.

The impulse to hire an editor at this stage is understandable. After pouring out your heart and your mind and your guts onto the page in what is almost always a complicated, demanding, labor-intensive process, it feels as if the next logical step is to get help pulling it together.

As good and promising as an author’s earlier drafts may be, it’s almost a certainty that they’re not yet fully developed and not ready for a professional edit.

The explosion in the market of industry professionals available for direct hire since the growth of indie publishing has furthered this misconception, compounded with pervasive messaging that indicates authors need to hire various pros at various stages of the process in order to produce a marketable professional manuscript.

The problem is that working with a professional editor before you have fully developed the story as deeply as possible on your own, or with the help of trusted objective readers, can significantly lessen the benefits of hiring a pro. With a story that still in an embryonic stage, or still being fully fleshed out, an editor must focus their efforts on developing and strengthening the basic elements of the story, which means the author never gets to dig deep into the areas that will elevate a manuscript and make it as strong, tight, polished, and effective as it needs to be to compete in a crowded market.

It’s not necessarily a waste of money, since working with a good editor can be a fantastic education in writing, editing, and revising your own work, like an MFA built around your own writing, but it’s not the most cost-effective way to go about it. But hiring one too soon does keep you from fully utilizing the resources and expertise of an experienced professional editor—in other words, it’s not the biggest bang for your editorial buck.

By the time an author works with an editor with a traditional publisher, consider that the story already has to have been developed and honed enough to have garnered a contract in the first place—more so in the current publishing environment, where publishers have increasingly less bandwidth to offer intensive editorial feedback.

Most of the work of writing, certainly at a professional level, is in the editing and revision process.

That means that throughout the history of publishing, authors have been expected to not only be good at drafting a story, but adept at editing and revising it on their own as well; otherwise they’d never get the offer in the first place. These are core skills of being a career author—I’d argue that they are the core skills, in fact: Most of the work of writing, certainly at a professional level, is in the editing and revision process. Drafting, as I like to say, is just the first base camp up Everest.

Part of claiming agency in creating a writing career where you have more autonomy and control involves taking responsibility for mastering the foundational skills of creating marketable stories—and that means knowing how to develop a draft into as strong, polished, and complete a version as you’re able to make it on your own before hiring an editor to help you bring up the rest of the gold from the mine.

So How Do You Know When to Hire an Editor?

In my Get It Edited guide I offer as a free download on my website, I offer a snazzy little flowchart to help you determine when you’ll get the greatest ROI on the usually significant investment of hiring a professional editor, including:

• Once you’ve developed and honed a manuscript to the best of your abilities but you know something’s not working, or it’s still not quite all the way “there” yet
• When you’ve received feedback that the story may not be as effective as you want it to be but aren’t sure how to fully get your vision on the page in the most impactful way
• When you’ve submitted to agents and publishers and gotten some requests, but no offers (if you’re not even getting requests, it may mean the story still needs the kind of foundational development that should be part of an author’s core skill set)

Good, experienced editors are like elite trainers to help you get to the top of your game. You wouldn’t hire an Olympic coach when you’ve just started running track, or after your first or fifth or even twentieth marathon. You go to the high-level pros when you’ve already reached high-level performance—and they help you push to the upper echelons of competition. But it’s on you to develop the skills and abilities that get you to that point—a basic part of building your craft.

And that may take time. Much more time than you’d like—or ever expected.

Read more: "What to Know When Hiring a Pro"

I’ve said many times (likely repeatedly here in this blog) that the craft of writing can feel deceptively easy because when we read good stories they feel effortless—and most authors are voracious readers, so we may get the false impression that we can spin up a compelling tale and get it published, the same way that after binge-watching episodes of The Great British Baking Show I’m convinced I can create a thirteen-layer opera cake as seemingly easily and capably as these bakers do.

But most of these avocational bakers on the show have been baking for years, painstakingly learning the minute principles of baking, and accruing countless hours of practice—including plenty of failures that get chucked right in the bin—before they’re able to capably face a Technical Challenge in the show and seemingly intuitively create some complex masterpiece even without a full recipe.

Most of the books you read that have been professionally published and become bestsellers or are critically acclaimed are also almost always the result of this kind of endless, often tedious study and work and practice and failure—you just aren’t seeing it in the finished book, which itself has likely already been through many drafts and extensive editing and revision (trust me—for decades I’ve worked in the industry and seen what goes on behind that curtain).

The result is that writers may not realize the hours and years and staggering work that goes into thoroughly mastering a craft that’s as complex as any I know: creating every aspect of a world and characters that feel fully fleshed and real—godlike. It’s like puppeting a marionette with an infinite number of strings.

Writers may not realize the hours and years and staggering work that goes into thoroughly mastering a craft that’s astoundingly complex.

And because of that, they may believe their story is ready when it’s not. After all, creating even a first draft is often a monumental effort—let alone the work of continuing to develop and deepen and hone it. After all that, it’s easy to think it’s farther along than it may be.

And that can be compounded by the strange distorting filter of creativity: When we’re in in “flow state,” kissed by the Muse as we get down that first “vomit draft,” as it’s sometimes delightfully called, it’s easy to think that what we’ve created is as good on the page as it can feel while you’re putting it there. The creative mindset necessary for drafting doesn’t often overlap with the analytical one needed for assessing how effectively you’ve conveyed the rich, full vision in your head.

Read more: "Write Like a Writer; Edit Like an Editor"

You have to learn to train your own editor brain for that—so you can put yourself in the readers’ perspective, overcome the near-universal obstacle of “filling in the blanks” of what you as the author know versus what’s actually on the page. And then keep developing, clarifying, deepening, and polishing until your story is as solid and tight and good as you can possibly make it.

That can be hard. It can feel overwhelming and confusing and frustrating and oh, so daunting. Writing is not a career for the weak of spirit—and skill and patience and persistence in editing and revising, I often say, is what separates the career authors from the hobbyists. You wouldn’t pick up a violin and expect to play in the New York Philharmonic.

Most of us understand that playing at that level requires untold thousands of hours of study and practice and development, working for likely years before you are even good enough to audition and have a hope of being chosen, let alone making the final cut. Why do we expect the difficult, nuanced, infinitely complex process of learning and mastering our own craft and competing at the highest levels to be any quicker or less involved? I’ve been working in this field for my entire career and I still am learning and deepening my knowledge and skills.

Write the story. Then sculpt it like marble, pass after pass after pass if need be until it’s as close to the finished work of art you imagine as you can get it. (Download my extensive free Self-editing Checklist to help you make sure your story is as strong as you can make it.)

And then, friends, if you still know it’s not quite there yet—then it may be time to hire the big guns. (And when you do, download my free Get It Edited guide to make sure you’re getting the most value for your investment by finding reputable, experienced pros, and know what it should cost, what a good edit should look like, and whether they’re the right editorial fit for you and your story.)

Talk to me, authors—have you or do you work with a professional editor? At what stage do you bring them in? When do you know it’s ready for editing?

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