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Go to any social event where you’re mixing with some proportion of strangers, like a wedding or a distant cousin’s barbecue, and in the course of social introductions, not long after the exchange of names and shortly before the discussion of property prices, the question will be asked: ‘What do you do?’ Some skip straight to the matter (‘What do you do for a crust?’) while others have the decency to let it organically come to light (‘I love crusts. How do you come by yours?’). I went skiing a few years ago and a man in our lodge found a creative path into the subject, asking me out of the blue, ‘Do you yacht?’ The question of vocation always seems a bit intrusive to me, mainly because people use it as a portal into your personality. They draw conclusions about your interests, your ambitions, your bank account, the talents that you chose to nurture while letting others die on the vine. A high school acquaintance told me recently that she married an accountant after college, and then went on to defend her husband: ‘But he’s a really cool accountant, and he mountain bikes.’ The fascination with vocation is understandable: we spend so much time in the workplace that ‘what do you do?’ has taken on the ring of ‘how do you do?’. And it really is interesting how people make their way through the world, even extreme-sport accountants.
I was at a wedding recently and exchanged CVs with another guest. When I told her I work as an editor, her eyes lit up: ‘That’s a dream job – I bet you read all day.’ While reading is certainly central to my job, the idea of an editor leisurely churning through manuscripts is far from accurate. An editor’s hours are long, often spent hunched over a manuscript or a keyboard like Bob Cratchit. You’re working inside every sentence, weighing up each word. You’re consulting with the author, sorting through the various plot problems that arise: How believable is this scenario? Would the character really react this way? Does she yacht? There are style guides to consult, facts to check, copyright material to clear, photos to secure, notes to compile, comfort calls to make. It’s serious mental heavy lifting. It’s serious reading.
When I make it clear that I don’t read all day in the casual sense, I’m often met with the opposite statement, ‘I bet you don’t read outside of work then.’ Built into most jobs is the expectation that when you come home, you place your professional hat on the shelf, slip into a bit of ‘you’ time and pursue something to distance yourself from the last eight hours. Food marketers don’t go home and try to pitch peanut butter to their neighbours. I can’t speak for other editors, but there’s nothing I relish more than coming home, hitting the feed bag, putting the kids to bed and picking up a book. It feels indulgent, almost illicit, like you’re cheating on your publishing house. You read differently as an editor at work – you’re conscious of your role the entire time; you’re aware of the book as a constructed artefact; you’re watching Oz work his magic behind the curtain. But the pure love of reading and the word (written, spoken, hollered) is the path that brought most editors to Bob Cratchit’s desk. And it’s what should keep them there.
When I read after hours (or before hours), the act becomes ‘pure’ again: I can disappear into a story or allow myself to be genuinely shocked and challenged again. I can dust off the old philosophy books. I can read the fad of novel. I can read Walden for the umpteenth time. I can try to understand Pynchon for the umpteenth time. I can fill in the gaps in my own experience; I can return to the well. When you enjoy art for art’s sake, you go back to the well. Consequently, I feel that I’m a better editor for it. When you surround yourself with quality stories, regardless of genre, you’re more likely to recognise quality in the work of others. You’re in a better position to help an author bring their writing up to that benchmark you’ve set inside yourself. You might need to bring home the bacon for Tiny Tim, but you should never neglect your own intellect.
Sometimes I encounter the misconception that authors are alone on an island of creativity, and editors are simply drab sticklers who take a manuscript and tidy it up by applying the laws of grammar and usage, laws as predictable and inscrutable as gravity. The truth is that there are few more intimate and dynamic relationships in publishing. The author has created something from themselves, stories and narratives often born directly from personal experience and refined over years. In many ways their book is sacred ground. The editor is then asked to enter this intensely personal space and alter it.
When an editor begins working on a manuscript, the first step is usually to produce a structural report, assessing the overall strengths and weaknesses of the work – its tone, characterisation, narrative flow, the way plot lines interrelate. Sometimes the author might take the story down several wrong paths before finding their intended one; this diversion can result in pages of loose material that needs to be revised, pared back or cut completely. Whether in books or film, we’ve all had that moment when we’ve asked ourselves: Was that really necessary? Where did that character come from? Where’s the resolution? What’s the point? An author might fall in love with an idea or character that, while having merit, fails to pull its weight or advance the story. The book might actually begin fifty pages in, or end fifty pages early. At this point we’re not really worried about commas or dangling modifiers.
In the same way that you’d never walk into a stranger’s house and start rearranging their furniture, rummage through their medicine cabinet or point out dust behind the sofa, the editor enters a manuscript with a high degree of humility and objectivity. You study the author’s style and voice. You learn the story’s ultimate aim. Every comment is reasoned and, while the author might disagree, sometimes vehemently, you’ve put the long hours into weighing up the work to justify your opinions. Nothing is done flippantly. The author has lived in their creation for so long that they might not see some of its weaknesses, and the editor is in the best place to view the work with new eyes. This exchange of ideas, this mutual search for clarity between the author and editor forges a unique relationship, partly because the stakes are so high. Once the press begins to churn, the book is in the world.
Some author–editor relationships have become famous in their own right. Uber-editor Maxwell Perkins discover and worked with some of the titans of American fiction: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. Perkins presided over Hemingway’s efficient prose, and the letters between Fitzgerald and his editor have been published apart from the novels. But it was the eminently talented and immensely wordy Wolfe who proved the greatest editorial challenge. Wolfe was married to every line he wrote, so when Perkins asked him to cut 90,000 words from his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, certain battle lines were drawn that would play out over a very successful and intensely creative relationship. Wolfe would eventually leave his publishing house, Scribner, aware that many attributed his success to his editor, but Wolfe ultimately counted Perkins as his closest friend. It’s this marriage between author, editor and manuscript that often produces some of our most successful books.
For the definitive biography of the Perkins, check out Max Perkins: editor of genius by A. Scott Berg.
Clues to the more mysterious things in life are often lying around us, common as dust bunnies, as numerous as mould spores. My ten-month-old daughter, Greta, likes to have a poke around, a casual survey of our unit kingdom. More often than not I see size-one feet disappearing around a corner, bound for a bout with the CD tower, a lurch towards a power cord, a cuddle with this really creepy doll my mum gave her that I’m sure will murder us all in the night. But in a home with more than a few books stacked around, the sound of tearing paper is worrying. On one occasion I found her with pages 1–4 of Bill Bryson’s Made in America between her gums, eyes wide, unconcerned. The back cover describes the book as a ‘triumph’ and notes its ‘joie de vivre’, so I don’t fault her appetites. The sight of Greta, pages scrolling from her mouth, set off a chain of associations that somehow related to reading, my job as an editor and life in general. I had three thoughts: ‘golem’, ‘Zoltar Speaks‘ and ‘I think I borrowed that book from Julian’.
The first of these, ‘golem’, took me back to a book I read several years ago by Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) titled Watch Your Mouth, which features a rampaging golem made by the mother of the main character’s girlfriend. Despite being described as an ‘incest opera’, I actually enjoyed the book. The notion of the golem is, to borrow a phrase from my mother-in-law and use it fairly literally, ‘as old as Methuselah’. In Jewish folklore, the golem was a being, much like Adam in Genesis, formed from shapeless, inert mud. In some stories it was animated by the inscription of the word emet or ‘truth’ on its forehead. In other versions, the words that brought the clay to life were written on a strip of paper and inserted into its mouth. Think Frankenstein with words rather than lightning as the active ingredient. To destroy the golem, you removed the ‘e’ from ‘emet’ to form ‘met’, the Hebrew word for ‘death’. The idea that words have magical properties, even the power to create or destroy, has been in circulation for a long time.
This chain of associations brought to mind Greek philosopher Hericlitus, who used the Greek word for ‘word’ – logos – to describe the order and knowledge in the universe. It’s then not a long path to the Bible and John 1:1: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ Jesus is described as the ‘Word made flesh’ (John 1:14). In more modern literary theory Logocentricism is the philosophy that words embody an inherent truth. The subject and the signified are one in the same. It’s good to be a person of your word. You’re only as good as your word. Buddhists have the sacred syllable ‘Om’ from which all other sounds originate. It is the starting point, the origin. It is the primordial word and beyond meaning.
And then you think of the words we use to signify nonsense or incoherence: gibberish, balderdash, flim flam, drivel, claptrap. (Page 340 of Bryson’s previously mentioned Made in America, the page my daughter is slowly working her way through, has an interesting derivation of ‘bunkum’ that involves a US Congressman called out for speaking nonsense to the people of Buncombe County, North Carolina.) These are high-GI words lacking in substance; they are one-dimensional and sound funny. You can’t imagine a parallel world where ‘flim flam’ would be a compliment. Balderdash is also a popular board game where you make up definitions for words you don’t know. Your success in the game is based on your ability to fool people into believing them. There is no relation between the word and what it refers to.
I’m not claiming that Random House is a purveyor of sacred words, or that editors are the Knights Templar of publishing, but my daughter eating a book was an interesting reminder of the importance we humans place on words as carriers of meaning. (You’ve heard people say, ‘I loved that book; I devoured it.) Certainly there are philosophies to the contrary, but I’m assuming most book-lovers go to book to experience something meaningful, be it escapism, pure entertainment, knowledge, or perhaps even enlightenment. We’ve allowed words to have this power over us, which makes the act of reading a kind of incantation.
In thinking about the role of the editor, my mind curiously jumped to my most humiliating moment. I played the bass clarinet for half a term in Year Seven. And I was horrendous. In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell puts the watershed moment of any successful endeavour at 10,000 hours of practice, whether swinging a 9-iron, cooking gumbo or fingering scales on a bass clarinet. 10,000 hours to greatness. In the course of six months, I probably managed to chip in three. The final grade was based on an all-or-nothing solo performance in front of the entire class. Naively assuming that the chariot of virtuosity would swing low on the day, I lugged the instrument, heavy and unwieldy as an anaconda, onto the dais and threw myself into a ‘solo’ afterwards to be known as ‘Copulating Whales in B Flat’. My grade: D-. The teacher’s comment: ‘makes no musical sense’. Knowing that musical sense was the only kind I was gunning for, I wanted to evaporate. My feverish effort was a blizzard of almost-notes thrown together at random. No structure, no definition, no soul. Even if I would have played the notes in their correct order and held them for their proper duration, it wouldn’t have resembled a creative act. All of the ingredients were in front of me on the sheet music, but I was blind to their significance. I’m still dealing with the emotional fallout.
It’s an obvious and often used analogy, but as musical notes are the principle parts of a song, words are the building blocks of storytelling, the elements of meaning. In book publishing, the author orchestrates the words, performs the virtuoso’s highwire act, and the editor listens for pitch. An editor’s job is to find clarity in a sentence, in a passage, in a character, in a story. Some passages might be bad bass clarinet solos: words are in some sort of reasoned order but they just don’t sound right; they fail to animate the heart or the senses. These passages might be cut completely. Other times it’s a matter of filtering out the white noise of inappropriate or wasted words, or rearrange their order to unlock the power of the intended idea or feeling. You can hear the tumblers fall into place.
Other sentences have all of the elements in order and are grammatically correct, but they have no soul, no groove. They carry meaning but no art. These passages are more difficult to correct because in most of our correspondence proficient language will do – no need to write haiku when emailing the body corporate – but it might be the difference between communication and creativity. The editor’s job is to know where language can be pushed, where a slightly different angle turns observation into insight. The success of a book hinges on a thousand such decisions.
And some authors just nail the solo. Their words sing off page and you put your pen down. Your role as editor recedes and the pure enjoyment of a reader begins. I’m lucky as an editor at Random House to work with some of the best Australian writers today. Deborah Forster’s THE BOOK OF EMMETT, which recently made the shortlist for the Miles Franklin, is a work that takes on the bleak topics of domestic violence but does it in a language that celebrates the details of everyday life. Her brilliant ear for language makes trauma endurable, makes hope possible. Roger McDonald’s upcoming novel MADE IN AUSTRALIA aches to be read aloud. Every line is leavened with his poetic gifts. They are authors who wring the most out of every word, who speak in our language but also ‘make musical sense’.
Good editors have good ears. They are able to work a manuscript from the general themes to the DNA of its sentences until words chime. And they also know when to sit in with audience, on the other side of the orchestra pit, nothing left to do but enjoy the show.
For a truly impressive bass clarinet effort, check this hipster out:
In its simplest terms, editing is the act of selection: weighing up the merits of x and comparing it against y. At twenty-three, sitting at the top of a ski run on the icy slopes near my home in Virginia in the US, sharing a cigarette with a friend, I decided to make a claim on behalf of my collegiate adventures in English lit. I wanted to take my classroom hunches about Keats and Kerouac and ply them towards something useful. I wanted to go into publishing and be an editor. His response: ‘What do you mean? Everything is “published”.’ This was a rebuke; the first time I dared to stake a claim to something more than a baseball team or a menu preference was derided as abstract idealism. Midlife isn’t the only crisis in the strangely lit hallway of personal experience, and there I was with children lining up to be firemen and stamp collectors wanting to work for National Geographic. But my friend was right: from the back of a cereal box to the back pages of The New York Times, from the instruction manual of an espresso machine to a religious tract, our lives are surrounded by publications, people choosing to lean on you with the written word, writers weighing up the merits of x and choosing y.
And we can extend this definition of editing to your selection of clothes in the morning, nervous words on a first date, excuses for your late arrivals, Botox before the class reunion. Short of a time machine, Facebook is the supreme method of editing your past: putting forward a succinct, manicured version of yourself to make up for years of strange, pedestrian, sometimes noble, sometimes desperate behaviour. Natural selection is nature’s editor, plucking out, with something resembling reason, our most admirable, useful qualities, nipples on men notwithstanding. George W. Bush’s line, ‘Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream.’ Unedited. ‘I have a dream.’ Edited. Politicians and wedding speeches that want to ‘speak from the heart’ are often too coarse or honest for our consumption; they’re in desperate need of a bit of an editorial buff. We have little patience for people who are ‘loose lipped’, for their uninhibited speech. Editing can be the difference between a solid two-page resume and limping through an interview. The comedian Chris Rock hits at a truth we all suspect: ‘When you meet somebody for the first time, you’re not meeting them – you’re meeting their representative.’ Is my description of smoking on a ski run while discussing a possible future in publishing a simple juxtaposition or an odd attempt by a man who lives by the pen to give his self-image a few calluses. Is it even true? Has my mind unconsciously editorialised. Flagging that I’m American has never been to my advantage; it should probably be edited out.
Book editors are often allocated rooms in the ivory tower: do not disturb. But book editing is a highly specialised version of something we all do: making judgements, choosing x over y. Certainly there is craft involved, a sixth sense tuned over years working within the medium of language with authors who can move, elevate and entertain us. There’s little whimsy involved; the hours are long; the depth of consideration given to a work is considerable. I can certainly write about the editorial tradition and what books ‘mean’ to editors and on what level it’s appropriate to intervene in a text, but I think it’s worth considering the world as something we’ve constructed – to our benefit and our detriment – something we’ve tried to edit to our perceived ideal.
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