| There is a pile of page proofs waiting
for the editor in the corner of the room, on the floor where she usually
keeps them. The pages have cat paw-prints and coffee rings on them,
but that's okay - the author will not see them. The editor communicates
only by e-mail, preferring to keep physical contact with actual authors
to a minimum.
Her physical contact with the text, however, can be intense, intimate: the pages usually end up grubby, creased and scribbled-on. She is not of the sharpened-pencil school of editing, but is more of a hands-on ballpoint-pen type, given to bold arrows and crossings-out, which is annoying for the designer involved.
Although it is her job, she finds the act of editing stressful. This is in the nature of the profession: a somewhat anxious temperament is essential if one is to devote care to, indeed to become neurotic about, the placement of commas. The job is not good for obsessives, but of course they are the ones who excel at twitching text into place.
But there is more to it than that. The tension editing provokes in her is familiar and slightly disturbing. It recalls other, not-so-healthy habits of mind: getting stuck on small decisions; the vain quest for perfection; anxiety and regret over trivial choices; excessive checking and rechecking; constant mind-changes; the compulsive righting of inconsequential wrongs; the desire for control; self-effacement. All are present in editing. Sometimes she almost feels as if she is exploiting her own neuroses in order to do her work.
Is anyone aware of her moments of horror and slightly pathetic triumph? Of the anxiety? Certainly not your average non-grammatically inclined author. Perhaps not even other editors.
Part of the pressure of editing is the permanence of the book. True, no one will know her mistakes but herself, perhaps her publisher, and the few sharp-eyed readers out there with an editor's eye for other people's flaws. But the comma she commits to the page is there for good; it will be reproduced thousands of times, be scrutinised by several thousand pairs of eyes, and float around in the world, offering itself up to such scrutiny, for decades to come.
And where is the author in all this? Quite far removed from the intense relationship between text and editor, it seems to her. The editor and the author have relationships with the text that happen at different times and places. There comes a moment in the production of a book when the author quite simply falls away from the process. This usually happens at proof stage, when the text is halfway transformed into actual book pages; it has semi-solidified, taken one more step away from the author's fluid ideas towards the fixed nature of printed matter. The text has also, at this point, lost the idiosyncratic signs of a writer's personality - a particular font or line-spacing, a way of numbering the pages, quirks of spelling and punctuation - and assumed the identity approved by the publishing house. Indeed, it can feel as though the author is barely there at all.
It is in the fraught hours just before deadline that the editor comes into her own: it is now that she can shift or shape the words on the page with impunity. The lateness of the hour gives her emergency powers - she can delete a line because it has to be done: there is no choice, no time for consultation with the author; executive decisions must be taken.
But it is also in this period that the neurotic pressure heightens: just before the thing gets shipped off to the printers (mysterious establishment that she has never visited, where vast machines conduct irrevocable procedures on a gigantic scale). Now there are definitely strange mental patterns going on. The nagging certainty that there is something very wrong, say, with the italics on page 96 is very similar to the anxiety of being convinced that you left the stove on; it requires repeated checking. And like such anxiety, it tends to dissipate once you realise that you can no longer go back to change anything. There is a distinct lessening of tension once that hideously flawed page 96 is winging its way to print; what's done is done. Now the manuscript passes into its immutable state: the book itself.
There is a special pleasure, to which she is mildly addicted, in seeing the slapdash turned into the perfect. Sometimes she feels she manufactures chaos in order to reduce it to order again - hence the rampant crossing-out and scribbling. All adds to the satisfaction of the final product. The transformation of that grubby pile of mistakes and reversals into something pristine: lines of crisp type laid against white paper. Disorder into perfection.
And soon there will be a launch with snacks and wine, books will be sold and speeches made, and all will be well. The manuscript will become a book, no longer subject to an author's whims; it will pass out of the realm of the editor's responsibility and into the realm of the reader.
She herself has written a book of short stories, which was edited and published. Being on the more creative end of the editor's correction pencil felt luxurious, indulgent, masterful. Like the owner of a grand house, she'd given the editor the keys to the service entrance of the manuscript; he'd tidied up and let himself out again. Oh, forget the commas, throw them around, someone else will pick them up. That's not my job any more, the editor will deal with that. Her editor was an easy-going chap, not one to put up a fight over fiddly details - not the true editorial temperament, she'd thought to herself with a mixture of scorn and admiration; or perhaps he just had a realistic sense of the effort-to-payment ratio involved. The work went quickly.
That was all very well while the book was still a manuscript, a work in progress, a thing in flux. But something changed the first time she saw the proofs: one step closer to permanence. The editor in her snapped to quivering attention, the author fell away. Out came the ballpoint pen, the scratching and mind-changing, the terrible indecision; she became headachy and tense and easily irritated by sudden noises. She was mortified to find the faults in her own writing.
It is a strange relationship, that between editor and author. The popular conception is of an intimate bond: two people devoted to the intense development of a text, side by side and line by line, engaged in lengthy debates on meaning and tone, swapping compliments on skill and sensitivity. In this scenario the editor works more for love than money, out of a desire to be a junior creative partner in, or perhaps midwife to, a masterpiece. But the editor knows that more usually, her work consists of mechanically processing a questionable text in a few short weeks - with, ideally, minimal authorial interruption.
Of course there have been good jobs, jobs where she has been motivated by genuine belief in a book and a wish to see it presented in the best way possible; jobs where her suggestions to the author have been given respectful consideration. When it works well, editing can make a book - and an author's reputation. The editor in turn feels the glow of an author's appreciation, and a vicarious pleasure in his or her achievements. There is also the minor creative fulfilment of the work: the commas and semicolons falling just so, murky sentences clarified, cumbersome structures hammered into shape; and, at last, a text that is clean and free from impurities.
But there have been bad jobs too: times when the author/editor relationship has deteriorated into bleak mutual contempt and non-communication, with the book like the child of a broken marriage shoved lovelessly back and forth, strips torn off it at every turn. Sometimes it is a genteel game of pretence: editor pretending to care more than she does about the text, willing to be its enthusiastic advocate and to flatter its author into surrender for as long as she is getting paid to do so; author pretending in turn not to be offended by the editor's crass pedantry. The process of editing is fundamentally critical - she is there to find fault and fix it - and it is this criticism that some writers find difficult to deal with.
Some authors don't need much editing; indeed, some have berated her for her errors of judgement, and gently corrected the errors that she has in fact inserted into their subtle texts. Sharpened pencils generally communicate such authors' wishes. They are civil but firmly superior. This is the kind of author that she would like to be. On the plus side, they generally require little work and pages flip over with gratifying speed.
One the other hand, some authors couldn't care less what she does with the book - just sort it out and I'll see you at the launch. Relatively fun in that she can lose the old red pen and go straight to editing on screen, answerable to nobody, finger constantly hovering over the delete key. Such manuscripts are usually better dramatically rewritten from start to finish - and short of actually adding whole new characters and plot lines, the editor can usually do what she likes. The resultant text, she likes to think, is generally a massive improvement.
Editors are not routinely thanked on the imprint page of books for their efforts, unlike designers. The editor moves behind the scenes - the invisible hand shifting the scenery to best effect - while the author is centre-stage. But while the editor is creatively subservient to the author's vision, she must often bend the author to her will in other areas: style, presentation, matters of taste. Furthermore, once she has edited a work she becomes the bearer of secrets about the writer, particularly those with reputations. She knows their errors, sometimes their ignorance; in many cases they too have had opportunity to judge her. Editor and author collaborate in a secret pact to remove flaws and hide them from the public, presenting a perfect object as though this was the way it had always been.
She doesn't know many other editors - it is a solitary profession. But sometimes she is aware, behind the rows of books in Exclusive Books, of a ghostly congregation: editors' voices whispering beneath the covers of all those books bearing other people's names, audible only to a fellow editor. She looks around at the glossy volumes that look so good, so flawless, and wonders: how many of these started life barely legible? How many eminent authors are truly craftsmen of the word? Are they masters of the nitty-gritty, the commas and hyphens? Not that this necessarily makes for a great writer - but as a professional, she would like to know which well-known figures deserve her journeyman editor's respect.
Sometimes, editing, she feels like she is rearranging objects in someone else's house - but with burglar's gloves on, leaving no prints on the text. Although of course an editor always does leave a mark on what she touches. Certain choices, matters of flow and rhythm. If one reads carefully enough, one can perhaps detect and recognise the individual voices of editors, muttering and grouching behind the lines of all the books that have passed through their hands.
She has never read a published book that she has worked on. She gets copies free from the publisher, but they look ugly to her on the shelf, their titles recalling late nights and her own ambivalence. She feels no ownership. Despite the pleasure of a well-edited page, she doesn't like to open these books in case her eye falls on a mistake. She prefers to read other books, books she has had no hand in, books where she can feel the author speaking to her in polished, accomplished, authoritative tones, apparently untouched by editorial intervention; uncorrected, uncorrectable. Although she know that such writers, in reality, are rare.
But tonight she can neither read - really read - nor write. Deadline is tomorrow morning, as it always is.
There is a pile of page proofs in the corner of the room.
|
Henrietta Rose-Innes's second
novel, The Rock Alphabet, has just been published by
Kwela Books. It has been selected as part of Publisher's Choice.
Her first novel, Shark's Egg, was published by Kwela
in 2000, and was nominated for the M-Net Book Prize. She was
born in 1971 in Cape Town and currently lives in Observatory
in that city. She works as a book editor and occasional film
and TV scriptwriter, and has had several short stories published.
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