To go more in depth, I have always had a love for books. Ever since I was younger, there was never a time when I wasn’t reading or didn’t get overly wrapped up in a story to the point that I couldn’t separate my life from what I was reading. Sometimes, I would stop reading for a few minutes and it would hit me that my own life was boring in comparison to what I was reading. That's how emotionally invested I was in the books I read. It should be no secret that I have lived my life through the lives of others’, especially the characters in the many books I have read over the years.
I would like to share with you how I became an editor. One day I was at the bookstore and I was looking for a book by a specific author. I had no idea what section the book was likely to be placed in, so I went in search of a salesperson to help me. I explained to her that I was looking for a book by the author K’wan and that I needed to find the African American fiction section. With a strange look on her face, she told me that what I was looking for was Urban Fiction, which was only further puzzling to me because didn’t both African American fiction and Urban fiction tell black stories?
Don’t be surprised, but from young age, I was heavily into Urban fiction and the stories I came across. I first discovered Eric Jerome Dickey’s urban fiction books and he was obviously a very popular African American author. Slowly over time, I realized that what separated his books from the work of other Urban fiction authors was simply the writing style and the effort that went into publishing these stories. I couldn’t help but notice that Urban fiction books were severely lacking in the editing department, and these books were published in a way that suggested that the stories these authors had to tell simply didn’t matter as much as the books stored under the African American fiction label. That has bothered me ever since. You can guess by now that, subconsciously, I’ve always had a burning desire to right the wrong done to the books and authors with the Urban fiction label.
As far as editing goes, it wasn’t until I was in college, in 2011 specifically, that I got my first taste of what it was like to edit someone else’s work. By then, I was majoring in English—something I had chosen because I didn’t know what else I wanted to major in—and my writing vastly improved from when I was in high school. You see, the problem with my writing was that I didn’t have, and still don’t have, the patience to write something from scratch, but I could always recognize the beauty in the words of others.
Anyway, I got my first chance to edit a book written by my cousin and his plot was captivating! His writing, on the other hand, could benefit from my touch and that was a task I was willing to take on. From that experience, I really came to understand what it meant to be an editor and also what it meant to put in the time to making someone else’s story and words a masterpiece. See, while I hate writing from scratch, I loved to perfect the writing of others. Again, subconsciously, this was another opportunity where the editor in me rose to the surface. It wasn’t until 2013 that I decided to start my own business and work towards become a professional editor.