A writer working alone is like an Emperor with absolute power over the millions of children he spawns. But inevitably some of the children get bad and some of them could be improved in the interest of the grand aim of that empire. But few fathers have the strength to correct or even kill their children in cold blood — no matter how much they should do it in the interest of their Empire.
This is where editors come in.
They feel no blood relation to the children but have the best interest of the Empire in mind. They kill. They purge. They change. They weed out the bad children until only the good remain.
For some writers this is hell, they see their world ripped apart, their children slaughtered and deformed. Writers are too close to their work, perhaps necessary for its creation, but emotionally devastating when it is changed.
But there is no need to kill the children. One can send them to a penal colony, an exile. Leave them on an earlier draft or copy them into a document that is locked away, save from the editors infanticide. Not killing the words but removing them to a special place, thinking “I might use you later.”, “You might start an empire on your own.”, or even simply: “You are my child. Even if you have no future in my empire, you are still mine, and I protect you.”
And then, perhaps, editing a document is not so hard.
