advertorial (or what we talk about when we talk about editing)
Editing is hard. After I’ve delivered an “editorial letter” or a “developmental edit” or “notes” to a writer, I always feel exhausted. And then a bit nervous. I worry that I’ve hurt feelings by being too direct (and sometimes I do). I worry that I’ve made the work about me, and my aesthetics, or even my politics (and sometimes I have). I worry that I’ve been bombastic and long-winded, that I’ve fallen for that thing that happens sometimes – where you become seduced by the unfolding force of the thing you are creating (the letter, the edit, the notes) and that then, this thing – which is, which must be, a creative work in and of itself – this thing starts to push the original work out of the way. That’s the thing I worry about most, that my own voice will overpower the more tentative one, the one I’ve been hired to listen to, to train, to direct. I think my strength as an editor comes from my strength as a writer, but (as some super hero has no doubt said, because it sounds so corny but also feels true) it is among our strengths that we find our weaknesses.
Editing is hard because no one really knows what it is. I will, at some point, update my website with a clear and concise differentiation of terms like copy-edit, proofread, structural edit (though I dislike this term myself) developmental edit, editorial assessment, etc, because there is huge confusion, even within the industry, about what these terms actually mean. Some people think I fix spelling and grammar (and I do, a bit, though my own spelling and grammar leaves much to be desired). But mostly, I find people (writers, clients) are looking to me to answer one quite simple (but also deeply unanswerable) question: is there something here? And answering that question is what I mean by editing.
What the person who asks this question means is – is this thing that I have slaved over, blushed to think about, despaired of – is it real? Does it exist? Can it exist? And I can’t really answer that question definitively, and you should never believe anyone who tells you they can. But I can certainly try.
There is the market, and actually the market is helpful. The market is something solid (if slippery) that I can point to, and direct the writer’s attention towards. I can say – is this where you want to be? And if so, I can help writers move towards it. But the market is like a child who has jumped out of the bath – the more you try to catch it, the more it runs away. You’re better off letting the child run around while you focus on what you were doing. If you’re doing something interesting, the child will eventually come to you. It’s what you do next, to keep the child in your lap, that’s the really hard part.
But the most interesting part of my work has little to do with the market, really. It’s to do with art, I’m afraid. And I use that term broadly – it includes what some people in the industry would shelve under “commercial” (I love how that word is anathema to some and catnip to others). But what I’ve found in my work, particularly as a freelancer, is that it really doesn’t matter that much what kind of end product the writer has in sight. What matters is the way these writers are using storytelling to try and make sense of things in their lives. And what’s really interesting, to me at least, is the crazily varied ways in which people are doing this – privately, quietly, on Word Docs and email drafts in all sorts of circumstances.
I’m also fascinated by the different things people are good at, and terrible at, in the beginning. Now that I work mainly with writers earlier in their practice (before they have found an agent or even thought about publishing), I am kind of amazed to find that an incredibly impressive sense of pace can sit quite cheerfully alongside a total lack of knowledge re paragraphs or how to write dialogue. Or vice versa. Or that a facility with language that makes me, as a writer, quite green with envy, can co-exist along with no clue at all about how a story needs to move. When I worked in-house as a commissioning editor, most of the stuff I received on submission had these kinks and imbalances worked out (to a degree). And yes, it’s much more challenging to work with writers still figuring out the basics. But it can also be a lot more fun – and it has proven, to me, once and for all, that talent has really very little do with all this. It’s much more to do with practice, with open-ness, with joy and experimentation (and then with some more practice).
We talk a lot about “voice” in publishing (I’ve just done it myself). I don’t like it and I shouldn’t do it. I dislike the spiritual connotations of that word, its implication that writing is something that emerges from some people, effortlessly and untaught. There is something “chosen” about the idea of “voice” and I can’t tell you enough how much this idea of the writer as a chosen one, an exceptional “talent” (another word I distrust, especially when wielded in a corporate context) that leads the rest of us towards understandings we could never arrive at on our own – is, while not entirely bullsh*t, is mostly bullsh*t. I’ve seen too many first drafts to fall for this anymore (as has everyone in publishing, I’m sure).
the usual (here comes the money bit)
And it’s also kind of reactionary – isn’t it? The author as the glorious individual, towards whom everything must bend. And all labour that rendered that individual’s glory possible must be made to disappear. Even the doing of the work itself has been rendered invisible: much editorial work in publishing houses these days is done in the evening, outside scheduled work hours, almost always by women, which is just a coincidence, probably. Or freelanced out at a rate they will get back to you on.
I’d like us to talk a lot more about this invisible labour. I’d like it to be celebrated. Evaluated even. In business they say you can’t manage what you can’t measure. You also can’t evaluate what you can’t measure. And if you don’t know how valuable something is, then it’s easy not to pay much for it.
It’s inconvenient for publishing to recognise the value of editors for two reasons. The first is the one I’ve already outlined – then they’d have to pay for it, and publishing is famously a low margins business and therefore it is totally impossible to pay the people who work in it well. And this is just a fact we should all accept without question.
The second inconvenience is that it undermines the myth of the author. And this myth underlines nearly every aspect of how we sell our products to the world – and it’s such a powerful myth that we’ve come to believe in it ourselves. We’ve become high on our own supply of literary auteurism, and in the process, forgotten about the hours and hours of hard editorial slog that go into the creation of almost every successful book.
I encourage editors across the business, freelance and otherwise, to look at all the acknowledgement pages you are featured in, and wonder – what is that acknowledgement worth, in hard cold currency? According to your time, your effort, your expertise? And what were you actually paid for it? The gap between those two amounts is the margin the publishing is building its profits on. The gap between these two amounts is what the industry is using to pay some people (though they won’t say how many or how much, another measurable they’d rather ignore) six-figure (and more!) salaries with. The gap between those two amounts account for the attrition rate in our business (another unmeasured measurable) and the fact that we as a workforce represent only a tiny proportion of the readers we should seek to serve.
How do we bridge this gap? Not sure. Get in touch if you’ve any ideas.
Also, if you like this, please consider contributing to In the Read here. I’ve made £120 so far, and spent most of that on my new logo. If you like the logo (she’s called Bookie, and she’s tired but hopeful), check out more of Daniel Hills’ work here.
Niamh