The Editor’s Blind Spot: When Clean Prose Smothers Author Voice

One of the quietest ways a manuscript dies happens long before publication. It doesn’t involve censorship, algorithms, or hostile reviewers. Instead, it happens on initial revision, when a book becomes cleaner, clearer, and somehow less alive.

Most writers assume the editor’s job is to remove flaws. That assumption sounds reasonable but leads to disaster.

Because flaws are not evenly distributed across a manuscript. Some weaken it. Others are load-bearing. The trouble starts when an editor treats all irregularities as problems to be fixed and not signals to be understood.

Prose can be technically sound and still feel inert. Anyone who reads submissions for a living can spot it a mile off. Sentences flow, and the grammar behaves. Paragraphs arrive on time and leave politely. Nothing offends.

But nothing lingers either.

The fact is, readers don’t remember books because the sentences behaved.

Read the full post on Substack!

Access it free for the first two weeks, then find it in the paid archive.