Usually I’ll call the writer as soon as I know I’m ready to send a contract, because it’s fun to break the news in person. I like having the writer know that I’m excited.

If I think there’s work to be done, I’ll say so right away, again by phone, just to see if the writer is likely to be agreeable—and to make sure the writer knows that all I want to do is make the piece what the writer truly wants it to be.

Some writers think editors should be hunted down and killed. There was a general feeling of liberation in the midnineties, when the Web got going: Now we don’t have to go through that horrible editorial screening-and-messing-with process anymore, writers will have direct access to the public! What everyone found out, of course, is that we do need a winnowing process. We do need someone to uphold standards. Netscape now has ten thousand volunteer “editors” supervising “category pages,” indexes of links to pages in their areas of interest and expertise, but that’s still too tyrannical for some, so Lycos has proposed an “open directory,” where anyone can be the editor, which, of course, puts us back at the beginning....

Editing is like brain surgery—if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can do a lot of harm. But I do, and if I say I can bore a hole in your skull and rip out that tumor, I can. I’ve killed a few, but I move on. You’re welcome to a second opinion.

I assume writers don’t send me anything until they’re finished with it. I assume they think their work has been taken as far as it possibly can be. But there are stages of perfection, and sometimes I feel I can help them take one more step. Sometimes a mere suggestion is enough, a hint as to how a rewrite might proceed. But often I’ve found it most effective to demonstrate on the page what I think should happen. Then the writer can agree, or not. Also, it’s easier—less traumatic—for the writer to see a nice clean galley, not a manuscript that has been slathered with red ink.

As a consequence, I’m able to accept manuscripts that “need work.” I don’t regard this as taking a risk, but, in fact, it is. Every once in a while someone will say, no, thank you, I don’t want you anywhere near my text. Or, after we’ve engaged in the process, they’ll say, you’ve hoplessly mangled my manuscript.

Or, I’ll think I can make something work, but, as it turns out, I can’t. Sometimes you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Which is a terrible disappointment to me. And to the writer.

Editing is a process that should not be internalized by the writer until a point well past the creative moment. Being too critical too early is just a step away from writer’s block. It’s important in the beginning to let the material flow. There’s plenty of time at some later stage to address technical matters. Some writers, of course, never get to that point; they don’t even spell-check. But I never hold “sloppiness” against a writer; it’s the big picture—the writer’s ability to move me—that matters.

After I’ve read a manuscript a few times—run it around in my subconscious—I just start whacking away. It’s said that there are no line editors in book publishing anymore, but it’s what I thrive on: making the most of the material that comes my way.

So I get my red pen and begin to work through the script word by word, comma by comma. By coming up close, I feel I can get a better grasp on the way the writer works.

I’m big on commas. I like a comma before “and” in a series. I like commas marking off adverbial phrases. I am a maximalist with commas, because I think they slow the reader down and help the reader understand how a piece sounds.

I also love hyphens. I guess this goes back to my days as a technical editor or maybe it’s my Teutonic lust to create great word-chains. (In my own writing I’m addicted to parenthetical remarks. I’m also a recovering name-dropper; I used to be like a tourist collecting postcards, but in my ZYZZYVA reincarnation I’ve learned to enjoy the slush pile of life’s characters.)

I love to rewrite. A blank page buffaloes me, but as soon as there’s something down on paper—or up on the screen—I’m in my element: going over copy again and again absorbs my obsessive desire to get things right.

I love to cut-and-paste, which is easier on a screen, but not as much fun as it used be with a real scissors and a pot of paste with a little toy brush.

The most obvious thing an editor can do is cut to the chase, deleting the paragraphs—or pages—in which the writer is just warming up. That’s a common error writers make, getting up to speed on the page, instead of in the gym, wherever that might be.

Endings are also hard for writers to find. It’s common to want to go on and on, way past the point where a story has really ended.

And it’s common to withhold information from the reader that should really be up front. I don’t like that kind of suspense. It’s also common to load up the front end with details the reader doesn’t really need....

Sometimes a writer is kind enough to acknowledge an editor’s help in public more explicitly than just by saying thanks. Kathryn Chetkovich, in the contributors’ notes in Best American Short Stories 1998, wrote: “My thanks to Howard Junker, at ZYZZYVA, who rejected an early version with the advice ‘Trust the mice.’ [Ed. Note: I don’t remember exactly what “the mice” had to do with it, except that she should go with them, but I do remember that she had begun the story 15 years before in a creative-writing class.] When he took the story this time around, he lopped off some of the throat-clearing at the beginning and tightened some loose screws at the end; after I got over my injured resistance to his intrusions, I saw that he was right.” That was very gracious of her.

Similarly, Kate Braverman in her 1995 Best American note: “I should mention my editor, Howard Junker, cut four pages from the beginning of the story and that really sculpted it. It was like a face-lift. He brought out the good cheekbones of the thing.”

My favorite comment was from Jon Billman, with whom I worked on his first time in print, issue 46, Summer ’96, for what seemed like a year: “Thank you so much for the editing. I learned as much from your take on the story as I’ve learned in two years in the M.F.A. program.”