Rereading this after so long – it was first published in Voices magazine in 1996/7 – I can’t help feeling that it has a slightly olde worlde feel about it, mainly because the position of books, and book editors, has changed so much in the intervening period. But I still feel that the principles hold good, even with the periodic fusses about the decline of print culture. And the relationship between an author and editor, in any medium that involves the evaluation of words, doesn’t really change. JK
Beatrice Davis, Australia’s first fulltime book editor and the mainstay of Angus and Robertson’s editorial department for almost 37 years, used to refer to her craft as ‘invisible mending’. What a charming and genteel image this is: one pictures the editor snipping away at a manuscript, patiently correcting problems, putting a tuck here or there, unobtrusively restoring the manuscript to its original splendour without changing it in any way.
Yes, it is a charming image, but it’s not the whole story, as anyone who’s been a book editor for more than a couple of years will attest. Invisible mending? When you have an author who goes ballistic if you change so much as a comma? When you have to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear? And it must be admitted that Beatrice Davis herself wasn’t so finicky: while her letters to her authors were always detailed, calm and circumspect, there is an occasional ‘I’ve cut from page 46 line 2 to page 51 line 13′ and she didn’t always let them see their edited manuscripts.
However, there are some important similarities between editing and invisible mending. Both crafts are practised mainly by women (ever heard of a seamster?) and both are paid less than magnificently. They are both also noticed only when done badly. Editors and invisible menders are both self-effacing backroom people, their work generally unacknowledged. If you are after your fifteen minutes of fame, you don’t become a book editor.
In many ways editing is a peculiar job. Like authors, they are small cogs in a huge conglomerate machine, considered necessary but a bit precious by the publisher’s bean counters. Yet the editors, invisible workers that they are, deal most directly with the providers of the company’s ‘product’: the authors. Their status is not high, they are usually first in the firing line when cuts have to be made, and yet they are responsible for quality control.
Depending as it dowa on a one to one relationship with an author, editing is also a very personal job. A successful author/editor relationship can be crucial to the success of a book and, like most important human relationships, it must be based on mutual trust. The author trusts the editor to help him or her make the book as good as it can be; the editor trusts the author to discuss directly any problems that may arise – that is, not to complain about the editing all over town or to bitch to the publisher behind the editor’s back.
And as in other human relationships, success also depends on each party’s recognition of the other’s vulnerability. Very often an author is presenting a manuscript to an outside person – the editor – for the first time. That pile of paper may represent two, five, ten years of solid work and obsession. Is the book all right? Does it work> Have all those late nights, early mornings and visits to the National Library been in vain? The overworked editor may grown inwardly at the thought of more reading, another manuscript to look at and work on, but obviously if she has any sense she’ll keep her feelings to herself. There’s nothing worse than an author feeling from the beginning that the editor doesn’t care about his or her manuscript; it’s an impression that is almost impossible to dispel, and it creates great problems when you’re working together. One of the rules, I think, is that if an editor doesn’t like a particular author, that’s tough, but it can be dealt with. However, if the editor genuinely doesn’t like the manuscript, if she is offended by the author’s tone, attitude, world view, choice of material, she is probably not the best editor for that particular book.
While author and editor are working together, they often learn a great deal about each other. They’re likely to find out about each other’s taste in food, political allegiances – as well as less tangible things such as sense of humour and reaction to stress. They may even become close friends. It’s rather like the rapport that can develop between interviewer and interviewee. Yet, just in journalism or radio, when the project has been completed, perhaps weeks or months later, both parties thank each other and go their separate ways. No more late night phone calls, no more meetings on Saturday mornings – the break is inevitable, often welcomed with relief, but it can also be disconcerting.
What remains is an unspoken compact between editor and author. When the job is over, you don’t tell each other’s secrets. Authors often give their editors information that they don’t want to be made public; editors know and respect this. That’s why journalists seldom get anything out of editors if they call them before certain controversial books appear, oping for inside information.
Authors aren’t the only ones who are vulnerable. Editors are in a shaky position if an author who is furious about her editorial treatment decides to go public about it. (It’s bad enough when a smarty-socks sub editor on a newspaper points out typos in a book you’ve edited.) A colleague once found herself with a very unhappy author who insisted her book had bren ruined beyond fepair but who refused to discuss the issue. The author had influential friends in literary circles, who took up her caes, bad mouthing the editor and her publishing company intermittently for years.
What could the editor do? What can any editor do when faced with an authorial grudge that has the half life of plutonium? Nothing. The editor just has to wear it, take the blame, hope it will all go away. When this sort of thing happens it’s a bit like the Prime Minister being unfairly attacked by the Opposition when there’s a grain of truth in the attack: whatever you say will only make you look defensive and wrong-footed and it would take too long to explain anyway.
Which brings us to the third similarity between the editor and the invisible mender: both are noticed only when they do a bad job. Unfortunately writers have no shortage of horror stories about the things editors have done to manuscripts. One carefully joined up Frank Moorhouse’s one- and two-sentence paragraphs on the grounds that paragraphs always need to be longer. In another case, an editor change ‘me’ incorrectly to ‘I’ throughout.
Sometimes editors are over-pernickety, which can be funny particularly if it happens to somebody else: James Thurber once referred to ‘the woman taken in adultery’ in a New Yorker piece and his editor, Harold Ross, wrote in the margin: ‘What woman? Hasn’t been previously mentioned.’ Some editors are too eager to impose their own personalities on the work. One Australian editor dedicated a book to an editor ‘who treated my manusript as if it were her own’.
Often authors don’t know what to expect from editors, though they’re very aware when these expectations – which they have failed to express – have not been met. Some authors say airily, ‘Just do what you think it needs,’ and become raging maniacs if the editor deletes a comma. Others consider the editor a wimp if she fails to unseam the manuscript from the name to the chaps. Some )usually those who have gained a reputation in a non-literary sphere) demand total grovelling approval for everything and are deeply sensitive to criticism.
Editors have personalities too. Some are over-eager, others too laid back. Some change too much, others too little, agonising about every word; if dealing with a well known author whose work is known and respected, some editors’ sense of handpersonhood to genius may paralyse their critical and editorial faculties.
Some may be so anxious to get the book right that they don’t choose their words to the author with sufficient care, appearing schoolteacherly and over-critical. The vast majority of authors and editors manage to get the job done with the minimum of friction and fuss. What helps, of course, is that both have the same goal: to make the book as good as it can be, given the constraints of time and money available.
These constraints are becoming more serious all the time. Turnover has become the great obsession. The marketing beast must be fed and, like other voracious animals, it is not particularly discriminating.
Where does this leave editors? They’re becoming more and more overworked as they try to push books through. Too few editors chase too many books, too many manuscripts demand attention. Most editors are very keen to do the right thing by their authors and publishers, but it’s easy to lose sight of this when punishing schedules leave less and less time to check things. Mistakes are inevitable: the pressure on editors increases and they become increasingly anxious. Editors are supposed to be meticulous: it can be salutary to remember that the word comes from the Latin for ‘little fear’.
There are other problems. With more books being published in this country than ever before, there are fewer editors in house than there were fifteen years ago.
Editors are often the first to go when publishers need to save money. The work is increasingly being done by freelancers, which seems ideal, because there is a saving on overheads. But often these freelancers are not vetted properly. Some are inexperienced, others have not worked in house, so they may be insufficiently aware of the potential for expensive mistakes. Their errors may not be fixed by the in house editor, who is chasing too many books with too little time anyway.
So, far from being a gentle occupation such as invisible mending, book editing can be a high-stress, low-paid, frazzling, difficult job. On your worst days you wonder why anybody would want to do it; you wonder why you’re doing it. I think the answer is, partly, that most of us have a passionate, almost visceral love of books and gain enormous satisfaction in working with words, helping to shape something worthwhile. We like to see ‘our’ books appearing in bookshops, we like to know that – maybe – they wouldn’t be quite so good if not for us. These things are real, but they’re not quantifiable in financial terms. Certainly not, because otherwise we’d all go off and earn twice as much as we do.
But it’s not looking good for the profession. Marketing people are taking over in the big publishing companies: publishers are being asked to justify doing local fiction, which sells badly compared to cooking, gardening or football books. Good and experienced editors are being fired and not replaced. There’s very little in house training for the few juniors who do join publishing companies.
I believe that if we’re to nurture this country’s literary culture, publishers must more fully recognise and respect the job that editors do. We must have our invisible menders – mass-produced ready to wear and disposable publishing can last only so long.
Voices Vol 6 No 4, Summer 1996-7
