The role that editors play on behalf of their clients is more complicated than most novice writers understand. This has everything to do with the fact that there is no one level or one definition of editing. In fact, there are four levels of editing—five, if you count proofreading as a level of editing—that I envision as an inverted pyramid: developmental, substantive, line, copy. Part of the trickiness of starting an editing project is choosing which level is needed. Why is