editor
In my experience of writing, you generally start out with some overall idea that you can see fairly clearly, as if you were standing on a dock and looking at a ship on the ocean. At first you can see the entire ship, but then as you begin work you’re in the boiler room and you can’t see the ship anymore. All you can see are the pipes and the grease and the fittings of the boiler room and, you have to assume, the ship’s exterior. What you really want in an editor is someone who’s still on the dock, who can say, Hi, I’m looking at your ship, and it’s missing a bow, the front mast is crooked, and it looks to me as if your propellers are going to have to be fixed.
Quoted in “Robert Gottlieb, The Art of Editing No. 1,” Paris Review, Issue 132, fall 1994.
I’ve discovered that one’s “ideal editor” changes as one ages. At 83, with one eye gone and a lot of my hearing, my ideal editor is a young woman, preferably a pretty one, who doesn’t necessarily know anything about prose but who is a good driver and willing to take me on long journeys in my car.
Letters of E. B. White, rev. edition edited by Martha White (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007), 664.