Quite honestly, on a day to day level I do the same as lots of other people – answer emails, go to meetings, catch up on admin.  But more interesting and relevant to this site is the bit of my job when I sit down with the manuscript of a book and a pencil and try to offer something constructive to say about the words on those pages.  Without wishing to sound self-important – and, let’s face it, I’m editing books, not saving lives – it does feel a privilege.  That manuscript might be the product of years of hard labour.  I might be one of the first to read it.  And the author in question is obliged to at least listen to my opinion, and more often than not the book will be altered – sometimes subtly, sometimes less so – as a result of it.

Perhaps I should explain the difference between the different kinds of editing in book publishing.  Commissioning editors commission the book in the first place of course, with a view to how much money it might make and how it will sit together with the other books being published around the same time.  They then often do a structural edit – or they hand this bit over to people like me.  Structural editing can be anything from ‘The ending falls flat’ and ‘That character is too obnoxious/ see-through/ unbelievable/ irritating, etc’ to ‘That paragraph/ sentence would work better over there’ or ‘This word jars’ or ‘Can we trim this section down a bit?’  The next stage is copyediting which is, strictly speaking, preparing a manuscript for typesetting, so correcting typos, punctuation, checking for inconsistencies (so that the girl with blue eyes in Chapter 1 still has blue eyes in Chapter 10), and marking up the manuscript with directions to the typesetter about how to lay out the text.  Sometimes copyediting and structural editing are done in one go by the same person, provided nothing really major is required.

As Jay’s mentor, Naomi asked me to clarify what Jay’s aims are with this commission, what she’s looking to achieve, and if there’s anything in particular the other mentors could offer feedback about. Jay and I talked about this. Essentially, she hasn’t written about nature before, and according to the requirements of the commission to give a sense of place, she wanted to give a sense of nature in an urban setting. This particular bit of nature, the allotment in Hampstead, is sandwiched between different areas of the city.

Jay and I agreed a structure to the feedback I’ll be offering her as mentor. This stage, the first, will be general comments (although I couldn’t resist picking out a few specific words or phrases, as you’ll see below). Stage 2 will be close editorial work, and stage 3 still closer refinement of the work. So the other mentors could follow that as a general guideline. And as Jay says in one of her blogs, she’d particularly like comments about which images work best and how they might be expanded to give a greater sense of place.

I didn’t appreciate when I first read Jay’s pieces (although maybe it’s obvious to everyone else!) that each piece is an offshoot (scuse pun) from the previous one. So they are all really linked elements of the same whole.

From a personal point of view, I have to confess that my first thought was – Help! This is totally different to editing a book. My day job is as a non-fiction editor at the moment (although I’ve worked a lot on fiction in the past). (An aside: Is poetry fiction or non-fiction, I wonder?) So I’m working from first principles, going on instinct. I realised after a while that I needed to read the words aloud. I’m used to reading silently. I, too, am trying to resist the urge constantly to qualify, to say, ‘Maybe this is a stupid comment, but …’

I love the fact that Jay’s scanned the handwritten pages, rather than typed them out. As a reader I feel much closer to her writing process, and it’s a privilege to see the crossings-out, the half-thoughts that never materialised or went anywhere, and the sketches. (Perhaps where writing gets really tough, where you want to scribble and cross out, is where it gets interesting. Maybe there are clues in those crossings-out. Or maybe I am making something out of nothing!) I experimented myself a little with place, so I read the work at home in my office, making notes, and then I walked to London Fields and sat on a park bench in the sun, reading a print-out, and thinking more as I walked home through the streets.

A few specific notes to you, Jay:
‘The city looks much the same whether hot or cold.’ I immediately wanted to question this: does the city look much the same whether hot or cold? (We’ve talked about this, and I know you agree on this point!)
‘This is the country in the city’ – I like the simplicity of this.
How is the night ‘superlative’?
‘the Georgian skulls of large houses’ – it’s a strong image, but the metaphor could be more subtle here. I wondered, how is this wealth sinister? Could this be developed more?
‘My first winter with the land.’ I understand this to mean that this is the first winter you have really noticed or connected with ‘the land’, nature. And you are newborn, in a sense – a nice image.
‘The green out dies the green’ – intriguing. Deliberately ambiguous?
‘mixed in’ a bit weak – I’m not sure this is quite what you mean. Are they more flung together, perhaps – but that’s not quite right either.
I loved the final lines, the first song that alliterates with the first winter, and the ‘fitful bird’. I think that’s incredibly strong, and beautiful.
I think the ‘sensing rain’ pieces are also very strong, especially the first, longer one. I prefer ‘land’ in the second line to ‘garden’. The line in parentheses – ‘(I’m losing weight)’ – rings oddly, but I quite like that. And the ‘dandy fur’ – childlike and nostalgic at the same time, it also gives the poem a warmth. I found myself wondering which you wrote first. Did the second come out of the first? Or was it an initial sketch for the larger, more complex one?

A couple of general, random thoughts …
The morbid feel to the allotment comes across loud and clear. It seems to be more than morbid, too – there’s something quite threatening: the sky ‘smoking in revenge’, for example. There’s also the sense of the city outside, contrasted with the secluded, safer allotment, where there are ‘no strangers, no visitors, no foreigners’. The ‘dribble and disease’ of Camden is far away, and the skulls of Hampstead houses are ‘up on the hill’.
I didn’t get such a strong sense of cold, though. I wonder if that was because you were focusing on what was around you, rather than your own physical state? Perhaps this might be something we could work on?

My inaugural blog, here goes … Jay and I met up just before Christmas to say a first proper hello and discuss the mentoring process. As a book editor, I often don’t meet authors before editing their work, which means that knowing how much editing is expected or will be welcome can be tricky. So this was a great way to kick things off. My brief from Jay is the more critique the better, so I’ll be wielding the red pen with enthusiasm!

As it happened, I had just come back from Yorkshire where I’d been planting strawberries and raspberries in my dad’s allotment. Jay and I talked about plants, and nature, and writing about nature and the natural environment. I read recently, for example, a brilliant book called The Morville Hours by Catherine Swift, which might be described as a diary of a garden, as well as personal memoir, history, and lots more besides.

After Jay and I have talked about her freewrite I’ll post another blog about what we’re discussing. So more soon …

Katherine