From Blake Morrison's very interesting Guardian piece about whether editing is going to the dogs:

Perhaps I've been unusually lucky, but in my experience, editors, far from coercing and squashing writers, do exactly the opposite, elucidating them and drawing them out, or, when they're exhausted and on the point of giving up (like marathon runners hitting the wall), coaxing them to go the extra mile. And yet this myth of the destructive editor—the dolt with the blue pencil—is pervasive, not least in academe. Perhaps the antipathy stems from the perceived difference between the publisher and the scholar: for whereas a scholarly editor, appearing late in the day and with the wisdom of hindsight, seeks to restore a classic, the publisher's editor is the idiot who ruined it in the first place.

A good illustration of this antipathy is the Cambridge edition of DH Lawrence. "Here at last is Sons and Lovers in full: uncut and uncensored," the editors of the 1992 Cambridge edition crow triumphantly. Their introduction goes on to allege that in being reduced by 10%, the text was "mangled"; that the editor Edward Garnett's censorship was "coy and intrusive"; that Lawrence "reacted to Garnett's decision to cut the novel with 'sadness and grief', but was powerless to resist"; and that when Garnett told him further cuts were to be made, Lawrence "exploded" with rage.

Read Lawrence's letters and you get a rather different impression. "All right," he tells Garnett, "take out what you think necessary," and gives him licence to do as he sees fit: "I don't mind what you squash out ... I feel always so deep in your debt." Lawrence was short of money, it's true, and had his mind on other things, having recently eloped with Frieda. Even so, when he writes that "the thought of you pedgilling away at the novel frets me" (pedgilling, a nice coinage, a cross between pencilling and abridging), the fret isn't what Garnett will do to the text, it's that the task is an unfair imposition: "Why can't I do those things?" And when Lawrence is finally sent proofs, he's not unhappy. "You did the pruning jolly well," he tells Garnett, and dedicates the book to him: "I wish I weren't so profuse - or prolix, or whatever it is."

It's true that, just as some writers write too much, some editors edit too much. As the New Yorker writer Renata Adler acerbically puts it, there are those who "cannot leave a text intact, eating through it leaf and branch, like tent caterpillars, leaving everywhere their mark". When he edited the magazine Granta, Bill Buford was sometimes accused of being overbearingly interventionist—in his spare time he hung out with football hooligans, and it was said he brought the same thuggishness to editing, though personally I never found him brutal in the least. At the other extreme are the quiet, nurturing sorts, the editors who ease you through so gently that when they do tamper with the text you barely notice and can kid yourself they did no work at all. Frank O'Connor compared his editor William Maxwell to "a good teacher who does not say 'Imitate me' but 'This is what I think you are trying to say'."

This brings to mind that pleasantly esoteric controversy about whether Gordon Lish did too much for Raymond Carver. Fiction editing does seem to be in some distress lately, at least within the high-literary blockbusters we're invited to read at extended-dance-remix length. Could someone kindly remind these lads about cutting? No, not the bad kind with a razor in the girls' bathroom, the good kind that makes your novel better. Also, assorted forms of weirdness and questionable behavior aside, Renata Adler is a hell of a fiction writer. If you haven't read Pitch Dark, I envy you the experience of finding out for the first time how frightening and lovely it is.

Black Day for the Blue Pencil [Guardian]
The Continuing Dissent of Renata Adler [Moby Lives]