Most writers I know massively overwrite. How common is it for a published author to have had an editor do a big cutting job?
Retired 72-year-old psychotherapist, living in India

Richard Beswick, publishing director at Little, Brown
Nabokov called editors “pompous avuncular brutes”. Thanks, Vlad! Working with novelists, editors both try and help writers sharpen and structure the story they want to tell and use their experience to provide a sounding board as to how readers might react to it. I say “the story the writer wants to tell” because ultimately it is the writer’s creation.

When I read reviewers’ snarky comments about the fall in editing standards at publishers, I sometimes wonder how much – or how little – they know about the conversations that would have taken place between writer and editor. Ultimately, as an editor, you just have to stand back and say: “OK, it’s your book.”

Writers who have spent years labouring over a long novel are often understandably attached to their intricate plot and large cast of characters, but there are certainly examples of great, long books that were once even longer. Vikram Seth’s poem with which he begins A Suitable Boy self- mockingly warns the reader against buying it lest they sprain their wrist, but the original version would have tested their biceps. The celebrated American editor Maxwell Perkins sent a large section of his author Thomas Wolfe’s novel Of Time and the River to the typesetter, though the author was actually still writing it. Perkins believed that Wolfe would just be unable to let it go and in the end Wolfe reckoned that Perkins cut half a million words from the published version.

We can all think of long books that could have been improved by a judicious trim, just as we can those that we never wanted to end. But who could honestly face even a single sardine more in Moby-Dick, let alone another family of elves in The Lord of the Rings?

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