Solving the mystery of what editors do
The Age
Saturday March 26, 2011
THE most famous book editor the world has ever known was not famous for her editing. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis spent 20 years of her life in the job, but it's only now, 10 years after her death, that we can find out anything about what she actually did.Some 80 biographies have been written about the phenomenon that was Jackie O, and just two books about her editing (Greg Lawrence's Jackie as Editor: The Literary Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and William Kuhn's Reading Jackie: Her Autobiography in Books). There are probably far more words devoted to her divine pillbox hats than to her editing. I was reminded of this when an astute Australian editor and publisher sent me an article from the Toronto Globe and Mail. In Canada, it seems, the economic downturn has forced publishers to lay off editors; authors are forced to hire their own editors, even before they submit their work for publication.They call it "the editing diaspora", with literary agents referring manuscripts to freelance editors, and the author footing the bill. Once a publisher might have said: "This needs a lot of work, but we're going to go for it." Now they say: "This needs a lot of work, you take care of it."It's an intriguing and somewhat disturbing trend that fortunately has not hit Australian publishing to the same extent, but it does call into question the whole business of what an editor does.Apart from the authors and editors themselves, nobody seems to know or care what editors do. Slowly, however, this long silence is beginning to break. In the autumn issue of Meanjin, Text Publishing editor Mandy Brett offers a dissection of what an editor does that is rare in its detail and its honesty.It's a crazy job, she says, because it's essentially bipolar: everything can go hard one way or the other, and the difficult thing is not that you have to choose, but that you have to balance.That balance seesaws between authority and humility; master and servant; instinct and self-questioning; professional self-image and other people's regard; the needs of the book and the needs of the author; simultaneously holding and letting go. "Your job is to make something perfect," she writes. "It is not possible." By the end of the article, I was no longer surprised she would wake up at three in the morning. What surprised me was that she got any sleep at all.Fortunately, writers are also beginning to break the silence around editing, acquiring the confidence and humility to admit that though their books are all their own work, that extra work an editor prompts may make a huge difference. It's not just grammar and spelling: it's structural problems that if not tackled may leave the reader with an indefinable but powerful sense of disappointment.Melbourne crime writer Angela Savage says she likes to show people the draft of her novel that won the 2004 Premier's Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript, then compare it with the very different published book, Behind the Night Bazaar.Her editor was one of the judges and she marvels that her novel won, because the editor had such a long list of things she wanted to change.The author is the builder and the editor is the architect, she told the recent Writers at the Convent festival. "The architect has that skill of looking in and seeing what's not there, but what could be there."janesullivan.sullivan9@gmail.com
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