Be a Reader First

One of the key ingredients you should look for when hiring an editor is a love of reading.

I don’t think there’s an editor who said, “I think I’ll become an editor because I hate to read.” If they did, then I wouldn’t recommend hiring them to assist you with your writing project. That would be like hiring a book burner to run the local library. It’d be a lost cause.

Before I decided to write or edit, I was an avid reader. I have been – ever since my babysitter read The Saggy Baggy Elephant and The Little Engine That Could over and over, to my delight.

By the time I was in kindergarten, Ramona Quimby was my favorite character. When I got hold of Judy Blume and met Fudge and Peter, I couldn’t put her books down. In high school, I loved Holden Caulfield’s discontent, I hated how Lenny killed everything he touched, and I grimaced with amazement as Ralph, Piggy, Simon, and Jack experienced unsupervised life on the island in Lord of the Flies. By then, I’d also discovered books I shouldn’t be reading, like Jean M. Auel’s Earth’s Children series.

When I left college, Anne Rice and Lestat, I’d developed a relationship with Jesus. I then married and began having children, so my reading preferences switched to the world of non-fiction, mostly under the parenting and marriage topics.

Until Edward Cullen, Bella Swan, and Jacob Black showed up. I resisted the vampire, knowing that’s where I’d left my reading when I became a Christian. But when my Christian friends kept raving about the story, I decided to give it a shot. I’ve never read an entire series so quickly in my life. I’m a processer. A slow reader. I take in the details and go back to reread for clarity when I need to. I read all four books in the Twilight series in nine days. Bad writing. Good writing. Whatever. Stephenie Meyer immersed me in a vivid fictional dream.

Since then, Steven James has kept me dreaming through Patrick Bowers’ life. I’ve also enjoyed numerous books by DiAnn Mills and Lynette Eason, among others.

I read across genres. Suspense, Romance, Contemporary. Sci-fi, Fantasy, Dystopian. I love YA. And I still read non-fiction, but my topics have broadened.

Because if you’re going to be a writer, there’s so much to learn from reading others’ work. What works. What doesn’t. What you enjoy about each book. And what you hate about it. Which rules you can get away with breaking and when. As well as which rules should always be followed.

And as an editor, I’m a reader first. Always.

There have been countless times I’ve grabbed a self-published novel and known from page one I was going to be too distracted by the errors in spelling and punctuation to ever make it into the story itself. There have also been times I’ve wished I could edit the best-seller and offer suggestions for improvement. If you can’t pull me into a fictional dream within the first three chapters, it’s likely I won’t keep reading. And honestly, I should be engulfed by the end of the first page.

So, I’d like to invite you to join me in an adventure in editing through a reader’s eyes. Because I will always be a reader first.

In my column, The Critical Reader, we’ll take a look at a book each month, and I’ll share what I thought could be improved and what worked (in my humble opinion). My plan is to reveal tips for you and your writing through looking at the work of other authors. And I’ll try to mix it up a bit from genre-to-genre and between fiction and non-fiction.

Until then, here’s to reading!