I think it's absolutely normal for a creator to want to retain control over their work.

But as a writer, I have control over my work. The editor offers a set of suggestions which (in general) I am free to accept or reject. No doubt there are bad editorial situations in which the editor/copyeditor has final authority. That is a bad thing.

Nobody expects Aaron Copland to change his score because somebody who is not even a composer thinks he should pick up the tempo in the third movement.

Nope. But when Aaron Copland has a new work commissioned, the orchestra feels free to reply "Yo, Aaron, no French horn player known to man can hit that note." The first orchestra does provide feedback.

But there's a big difference between "You do realize you've used seventeen semicolons on this page?" and "Never use the passive voice." Anne Rice is claiming that she's worked so hard that no change could improve the work, and I call bullshit.

I think it's arrogant to assume that, in a 700-page novel, she has no spelling errors, no typos or misplaced homonyms, never forgot that James left the knife in the kitchen, and never typed "Frank" when she meant "Jerry".

I love my betas. I don't always agree with them. But they do force me to think about how a reader is going to respond to the story. If I want to have a lot of people read and like the story, it helps to have several different people read it and tell me what they liked and didn't like, and whether I made any mistakes. I can then make my decisions about what to keep and what to change, with an eye on the market.

If I have no concern with reader-response, then okay, I ignore all my beta comments. But then I don't get to bitch at people who don't respond positively. Because I made a conscious choice to avoid thinking about reader-response, and to write only for myself. I do post without beta sometimes, for a variety of reasons. But if it fails to please I don't snarl at the readers who aren't showering me in feedback.

Rice is cake-eating and cake-having.

And there's a broad spectrum of editing between rewriting someone's prose and just running spellcheck. I have no idea what Rice means when she says she hates editors, but it feels as if she won't let them even fix her typos.

I think Rice's arrogance comes from equating editing with "mutilating," which is a direct quote:

"I have no intention of allowing any editor ever to distort, cut, or otherwise mutilate sentences that I have edited and re-edited, and organized and polished myself."

I honestly don't think that there is a single piece of writing ever produced that couldn't benefit from at least one other person looking it over. I simply don't.

There are a lot of us here who are writers and editors, and I'll tell you, when I'm wearing my writer hat, I have fits when someone edits my work. I have the same Anne Rice reaction: it's PERFECT! Every word is exactly where it needs to be, etc., etc.

And then it turns out that some judicious editing makes my writing much better. And by "better," I mean "more readable."

Anne Rice may be the expert on Writing in the Style of Anne Rice. That's fine. But the real issue is this: is Writing in the Style of Anne Rice resulting in more readable prose?

t edit Or, what Suela said about reader response.

I think it's absolutely normal for a creator to want to retain control over their work.

Oh sure. To want to retain control, absolutely. But wanting something, and having that something be the right thing, are quite different.

I don't know a lot of musicians or visual artists, but the ones I do know will come to what they think is a stopping point (or even just a midway point) and ask, "What do you think?" They're not doing that to flatter me, and the ones who have something better than cotton wool between their ears aren't doing that to flatter themselves. They really want to know what I think, whether they're on the right track, what could stand improvement.

It's possible, nay, easy, to want the response to be, "Perfect! Don't change a thing!", but not asking the question at all is begging to be told the answer in unkind fashion (possibly, sales numbers).

I don't know a lot of musicians or visual artists,

Plus, composing and painting aren't the same types of processes as writing. If you've painted a canvas, and then it's poorly received, you have to start over with a blank canvas. There is no editing of a finished painting.

With writing, you don't have to throw out the mss. and start over (unless it sucks mightily; in which case, you have bigger problems). Writing lends itself much more to revision than do any visual art media.

Rice is cake-eating and cake-having.

And rice cakes are only ever so-so at best.

Even with lots of cheese.

There is no editing of a finished painting.

(This isn't entirely true; Winslow Homer kind of famously painted out the human figure in one of his seascapes by making a really tall wave splash over her. Enough people knew about the original that they didn't need to discover this via, like, x-ray.)

But in general, Steph's right -- words are pretty easy to edit mid-stream than most artistic media. It's possible to edit a movie to tell a completely different story, but beyond a certain point you have to go fetch all the actors and shoot more footage.

Well, and a movie is the classic example of a collaborative effort: it cannot physically be created by a single person.

t Hopes that the phrase "Gilmore Girls meets Witches of Eastwick" t enflames the imagination of a talented ficcer.

t blinks

Gus, what are you trying to get at here?