I was asked to contribute a blog about WHAT I DO …

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.

But what makes a good editor?  In my opinion, truly great editors are invisible.  The editor’s job is, of course, to help the author to rewrite and create a better book.  In doing this, they must, as far as possible, put themselves in the mindset of the author (think: What are they trying to say here?  What are they trying to do?) and steer them back on the right – that is to say, the author’s own – path.  Of course, the editor’s viewpoint will always ultimately be their own (and see below) but I believe a certain amount of humility in this job is important.  It is the author’s name on the cover of the book, not the editor’s.

Good editors are also sensitive, caring and thoroughly capable midwives.  They hand-hold, mop fevered brows, offer advice and encouragement.  Sometimes they need to be quite tough.  The author has already done the vast majority of the work – conceiving of it in the first place, making it a whole being, complete with (ideally) the ‘i’s dotted and ‘t’s crossed.  And the editor cannot actually give birth to that baby, but he or she does everything possible to make its coming out into the world as pain-free and positive an experience as possible.  (Let’s hope writing a book isn’t comparable to the pain of childbirth.  I wouldn’t know, having done neither.)

By its very nature, editing is subjective.  It’s an instinctive thing.  Editors are (one would hope) employed as such because they are naturally good at it, and pinpointing exactly what isn’t working in a book or coming up with suggestions as to how it might be fixed does come more readily with experience.  But just because I pay my rent by editing books doesn’t necessarily make my opinions about a book any more valid than those of a butcher, baker or candlestick maker.  And that leads to me what I think is so great about this site, which probably tells us a whole lot more about the editorial process than invisible midwives or any other analogy.  Because the work-in-progress of poetry has here gone public, bloggers have been commenting, criticising, encouraging, and had walk-on parts as editors for months …

Katherine