For most of history, editors worked only with dead authors. These first text workers were the scribes of antiquity – paid to literally rewrite texts (to which they only rarely, and daringly, added their own amanuensis-style adaptations).
As soon as we got living, breathing authors, with the rise of the printing press in the late 15th-century, we got editors to match. The moment that texts became plastic – when writing was being actively created and not just curated – is the moment the words and the people behind them needed a second pair of eyes. 600 years ago and still this editor-writer dynamic feels familiar. Editors were – as today – PR men, motivational speakers, drivers of culture, literary butchers and psychologists.
What an editor does
In his notebooks, Henry James claimed to be able to "see" the end state of his writing, the ideal form it already had if he could only find it. It is an editor's job to share this vision with the writer – not to overlay their own interpretation over the original and in the process blur the picture.
Maxwell Perkins, the archetypal "editor of genius" who shepherded Fitzgerald's and Hemingway's chaotic careers, is famed for responding to desperate writer letters with an offer of an evening at the pub. Frantic authors would arrive with sheafs of paper, ready to dig in, only to find Perkins sitting in comfortable silence with a newspaper and two drinks. Writing was never discussed. Somehow, it was always fixed.
But editing isn't all barstool psychology. After all, Perkins also cut 90,000 words from Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel. The best editors, though, work with their shared vision as a map, transforming editorial work into archaeological uncovering (in the Stephen King tradition).
Take literary impresario Ezra Pound and his now-mythic role in editing Eliot's The Waste Land as a prime example (unfortunately, this essay does not deal with his also-almost-mythic throwing of Robert Frost across a restaurant during his jujitsu phase; for another time). Pound, whom Eliot dubbed il miglior fabbro, the better craftsman, in his dedication for The Waste Land, cut half of the poem in a single 1921 session. But Eliot later said, "He was a marvellous critic because he didn't try to turn you into an imitation of himself. He tried to see what you were trying to do."
Editors today
I recite history here to explore its repetition, and what forgetting it has cost us. Editors, in their medieval Italian heyday more famed, adored and respected than authors themselves, today feel more anonymous – certainly less heroic. It is an empathetic art they practise; the form they take is cast not of themselves but in the likeness of the writer – a labour of the shadows, as Knausgaard puts it. The better craftsman Eliot once honoured has become the invisible one.
And it is no mystery how we lost sight of them: a culture tuned for output stops prioritising the one role whose purpose is to slow you down and ask what you actually mean. The value an editor brings is hard to measure, and so a world bent on efficiency forgets they were ever there. But we ignore them at our peril. With an editor, writing, writers can soar. Without, both can plummet.
Forgetting the editor
Writing moved to the screen in the 1970s. My favourite early "word processor", the delightfully named Electric Pencil from 1976, basically invented the formula for modern word processing - word wrap, find and replace, the lot. Microsoft Word then spread these familiar features to 2 billion people over the next 50 years. This formula, while certainly magic (if not heresy) to those scribes of old, wasn't all that different from the work they did every day – both are transcription engines at heart (with only the occasional foray into more expansive realms of spell check, grammar or in the monk's case, the odd unsanctioned illumination).
Then came the language models, and the formula changed entirely. Having lost sight of the editor, it never occurred to us to build one, so we handed the tool the wrong job instead - that of the author themself. So is it a surprise that Google Docs plasters every new blank page with a giant input field "Write a paragraph for me"? Or that Word uses co-pilot to prompt the same?
These tools have mistaken writing for a product rather than a process. Writing is thinking, the final words are just the last artefact of endless decisions. When models take the pen, they turn us all into the "imitation" Eliot feared. Perkins and Pound may have been heavy-handed in their editorial intrusions, but they only cut and cajoled; they never composed.
Marker is a space for thinking
and writing
Marker is our riposte to the state of modern writing – a tool that supports your every writing move without hijacking your thinking or steamrolling nuance. It is built instead to help you, like James, "see" what your writing is going to be. To ask you what you think. To push you back into the chaos of your piece, sitting with you in the maelstrom with a newspaper and two drinks.
I will leave you with F. Scott Fitzgerald, who describes in a letter to his editor what he means to him and what we want Marker to mean to you. In the midst of the The Great Gatsby, then known by its dubious initial name "Trimalchio in West Egg", he writes to Perkins full of angst that he cannot let the book go out until it shows what he is capable of, and that with Perkins's help it could be, truthfully as it turns out, "something better than I'm capable of".
Marker, like all good editors and partners, is here to help you create things that are better than you are capable of. Write with us.