The Art (?) of Editing
Editors are both lauded as heroes and reviled as villains. In “Let Us Now Praise Famous Editors,” Gary Kamiya tells us that the job of editors can be to toil as “craftsmen, ghosts, psychiatrists, bullies, sparring partners, experts, enablers, ignoramuses, translators, writers, goalies, friends, foremen, wimps, ditch diggers, mind readers, coaches, bomb throwers, muses and spittoons—sometimes all while working on the same piece.”
We at Schlager Group come out of the old-school Scribner tradition of forelock-tugging amanuenses (from Latin a manu—“by hand”—and in servus a manu—“enslaved servant with secretarial duties”), trained to efface the self. It is not we who count; it is the prose we shepherd from manuscript to book page. One of our style guides instructs the copy editor in the proper way to address queries to the author: “Never use the first person. Editors must pretend that they do not exist.” Even so, I have been ill-used as a spittoon perhaps as often as I have been praised as a guiding muse.
Kamiya tells us that “the art of editing is running against the cultural tide. We are in an age of volume; editing is about refinement. It’s about getting deeper into a piece, its ideas, its structure, its language. It’s a handmade art, a craft. You don’t learn it overnight. Editing aims at making a piece more like a Stradivarius and less like a microchip. And as the media universe becomes larger and more filled with microchips, we need the violin makers.”
I would be interested to hear the thoughts of our editors and writers alike on the arts of writing and editing and the uneasy alliance of writers and editors.
In the meantime, I will return to my job (in Kamiya’s words) as Mr. Wolfe, the problem solver from Pulp Fiction (“You have a corpse in a car, minus a head. Take me to it.”)
September 13th, 2007 at 1:41 am
Marcia quoted from Gary Kamiya’s discussion of what editors do and quoted about twenty components of the job description (”craftsmen, . . . mindreaders, coaches. . .”). It’s a good list, and one that begs to be supplemented by a set of rules for achieving or maintaining these qualifications.
As someone who has reviewed the editing and copyediting of others for many years and perceives a diminution in quality, I suggest the following:
Rule 1. Don’t change it wrong.
Corollary: When it doubt, look it up.
Those who choose editorial work usually have considerable self-esteem in the areas of writing and general knowledge. This is essential; but no less important is a level of humility realistically calibrated to balance the editor’s experience against that of each author.
Absent a sense that perhaps an author had it right, the temptation to change something that “looks funny” can be overwhelming, especially under deadline pressures. It’s often worthwhile to consider, however, that a writer who’s been publishing in a given field for decades has had the opportunity to acquire a breadth of knowledge not yet attained by the editor. This in turn should lead to the thought of verifying a questionable word, usage, or statement. With the resources of the Internet available to everyone, the habit of checking the unfamiliar, the “funny looking,” isn’t hard to develop.
Here’s an example of a phrase that should have been checked. The Wall St. Journal recently published an op-ed piece by a respected expert on environmental matters. The author had come up with a wonderful metaphor: “The Deutschebank building,” he undoubtedly had written, “is a vertical Love Canal.” But the Journal printed “vertical love canal.”
In fairness, the perp here may not have been an editor or copyeditor. An overeager proofreader who was 8 years old when the Love Canal disaster was making headlines may have had an attack of assume-itis: “No reason in the world for caps there. Who knows what this horny old fart of an author intended by way of double entendre, but let’s be discreet and kill the caps.”
Google would have made short work of that one. Yet hardly a day goes by without a similar howler seeing print in a world-class publication. We all make mistakes, and in daily journalism some, even quite a few, are inevitable. There’s far less excuse for such errors in books.