I'm starting to edit a piece, and I've been procrastinating. At least I'm wasting time online researching the topic of editing, so I can claim I'm doing tangential work.
Kind of.
Does anyone else do this?
Anyway.
Found an old Guardian article on editing, and how the role of editor is changing in the book industry:
"For some years now – almost as long as people have been predicting the
death of the book – there have been murmurs throughout publishing that
books are simply not edited in the way they once were, either on the
kind of grand scale that might see the reworking of plot, character or
tone, or at the more detailed level that ensures the accuracy of, for
example, minute historical or geographical facts. The time and effort
afforded to books, it is suggested, has been squeezed by budgetary and
staffing constraints, by the shift in contemporary publishing towards
the large conglomerates, and by a greater emphasis on sales and
marketing campaigns and on the efficient supply of products to a retail
environment geared towards selling fewer books in larger quantities.
"Many speak of the trimming of budgets, the increasingly regimented
nature of book production and of the pressure on their time, which means
they have to undertake detailed and labour-intensive editing work in
the margins of their daily schedule rather than at its centre. One
freelance editor I talked to remarked that "big companies used to have
whole copy-editing and proof-reading departments. Now you'll get one
publisher and one editor running a whole imprint." She'd noticed that
some editors tended to acquire books that arrived in a more or less
complete state."
That jibs with what I've heard. Publishers have less resources, so the closer your work is to being shelf-ready, the better. "In 2005, Blake Morrison wrote a long essay on the subject
in which he noted that, despite the inherent fuzziness of the line
between facilitating a writer's work, with the occasional firmness and
wing-clipping that entails, and the kind of over-editing that can result
in a loss of authenticity and spontaneity, editing was vital to the
business of writing and publishing. "When a book appears," he concluded,
"the author must take the credit. But if editing disappears, as it
seems to be doing, there'll be no books worth taking the credit for."
I think that goes too far, but for many of us (such as myself) it would be the case. There are even some very prominent authors, incredibly successful ones, who could do with a more assertive editor. Readers will put up with their superfluous prose because the rest is so good, but that doesn't mean they don't need an editor.
Dean Wesley Smith, who has an awesome website and talks openly about his craft, is a three draft writer, and claims most pros are.
Could be.
Editor Carmen Callil:
"The old-fashioned editor has to a great extent disappeared, but I'm
not too sure that's a great loss; and the improvement in sales,
marketing and design effort, in my opinion, more than makes up for it.
Editorial work is often farmed out to freelance copy-editors, and not
done in-house as it used to be. Have freelance editors got worse? I
don't imagine so. Also, was "old-fashioned" editing as great as it is
often claimed to be? Moaning about the good old days is as much a part
of writing life as drinking too much and a partiality for parties and
too much smoking."
Jeanette Winterson, whose work I quite like, chimes as well:
"Editors have become linear and timid. They worry about how things follow
and Emma Bovary's eyes both change colour unexpectedly, and no one
minds. As Virginia Woolf wrote, "all my facts about lighthouses are
wrong". So there is wrong that is right, and that is better than rigid
rightness that is wrong. I find, too, that many younger editors simply
don't have the cultural resources to recognise a reference or
playfulness therein."
Read the whole thing.
A good editor you're simpatico with is worth their weight in gold.
And they'd probably want to edit that sentence.
I wonder what's on TV...
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