Editing is about the craft, whether it's helping other people tell their story, or whether it's editing your own work, which I learned how to do because I worked with so many other people. And it's amazing what you can take out. Some people write with a lot of 'fat and gristle' and when you take it, it really isn't much different. It's kind of like making somebody go on a diet to lose seventy five pounds. When you get done, you have the same person, only they're lighter.
Some books are like that.
I remember being asked to cut William Manchester's 'American Caesar' which was a humongous biography about Douglas MacArthur that we were interested in doing. What the author had done was to enrich the story with so many anecdotes, and give you six or eight to make a point. All we had to do was pick a couple. By taking two anecdotes instead of six, I brought that book down by almost fifty percent, the first time around. And yet, I preserved all of his structure, all of his intent, everything he would have wanted to be there.