Ellen Seligman On Editing Fiction:

Seligman is Canada’s “top fiction editor”: “You read a book, and maybe one can say what maybe needs work or what could use revision here and there. So, a reader might be able to do that. But if you’re really going to be useful, I think an editor has to understand what is possible to do. So you learn to develop the idea that ‘Okay, this is this book’ and you learn to make a distinction between what changes would make it another book as opposed to what can be done with the rough parameters of what the author wants to do with this book.”