The Mysterious Role of Editors
Who they were/are and what they (really) did/do?
Introduction
I’ll admit to having given a few, if any, serious thoughts to editors and what they really do, until I became in need of one.
Somewhere at the very back of my mind, a notion of the long, boozy lunches in smoke-filled rooms where people of letters — writers, poets, critics, editors, publishers, and assorted wannabes — congregate to robustly discuss, edit, and dissect books and the merits of written words, still lingered. I mean — editors are supposed to edit: what else would they do?
Well, as it turned out — I was a few, or let’s be honest, several decades out of time. Not only had that kind of camaraderie among literary sorts long died out, but the rigorous line-by-line editing of books has long been lost to the demands of sales and publicity.
Changes in the Role of Editors
So, what has changed? The answer, I am told, lies in:
The changing role of the editor,
The evolving publishing industry, and
Readers’ expectations.
For several years, almost as long as predictions of the death of the book have existed, there have been rumours within the publishing industry that books are not edited as they once were.
Time and effort devoted to books have been constrained by budgetary and staffing limitations, the shift towards large conglomerates in contemporary publishing, and an increased focus on sales and marketing campaigns, as well as efficiently supplying products to a retail environment focused on selling fewer books in larger quantities.
Broadly speaking, the image of the word-obsessed editor meticulously poring over a manuscript, red pen in hand, has been replaced by that of the dynamic entrepreneur attuned to the latest market trends, more comfortable with a tweet than a metaphor.
The Changing Nature of Text and Reader Expectations
Many speculate on the changing nature of text itself and readers’ evolving expectations and demands.
While most readers are unhappy when they purchase a book only to find spelling, grammar, and factual errors, some may feel that other considerations are more important. Given the proliferation of user-generated content and the demand for instant gratification, it is unsurprising that speed and economy are often prioritised over care and quality.
This shift may also have altered our perception of creativity. Kirsty Gunn, a novelist and professor of creative writing, is concerned that the publishing business is becoming collaborative in the wrong way:
“To my mind, there’s a wicked expectation that literary work can be created by some kind of committee. I’ve always been horrified by the notion of sending in a draft that isn’t finished. I think there’s a real difference between sitting down and creating a piece of work and then having a conversation with someone you respect, and sending in a piece of work and thinking, we’ll work on this together.”
The Impact of Collaboration on Creativity
Gunn worries that the culture of workshops and the desire to be published at all costs can erode a writer’s sense of control over and responsibility for their own work.
In her view, “the business of being a serious writer, of creating a piece of work that is your own, is about being your own editor… If you’re creating something that’s ultimately a product of the economy, then it is going to be made in a different way. That’s very different from having a sense of a project in your mind that you want to develop and see to completion. I think this is why there’s a lot of talk about books not being edited properly any more.”
Gunn’s concerns resonate with a broader view that publishers are increasingly keen to second-guess their readership, creating clearly defined products that will satisfy picky retailers. This leads to a wider anxiety about the role of editing and the position of the book in contemporary society.
The Relationship Between Editors and Writers
Inher essay about her editor, the late Henry Robbins, Joan Didion wrote:
“What editors do for writers is mysterious, and does not, contrary to general belief, have much to do with titles and sentences and ‘changes.’ The relationship between an editor and a writer is much subtler and deeper than that, at once so elusive and so radical that it seems almost parental.”
For Didion, an editor gives the writer “the idea of himself, the idea of herself, the image of self that enable(s) the writer to sit down alone and do it. This is a tricky undertaking, and requires the editor not only to maintain a faith the writer shares only in intermittent flashes but also to like the writer, which is hard to do.”
The Value of a Good Editor
Pat Conroy, who, by the time he had finished The Prince of Tides, had a manuscript of 1,400 pages, knew that his novel would have to be trimmed. “I overwrite,” he said,
“and I depend on an editor to get rid of the baroque, byzantine stuff that might humiliate me when the book comes out.”
The task fell to Nan Talese not long after she had become editor in chief at Houghton Mifflin. “The size and scope of it were rather overwhelming,” said Talese, who was conscious of Conroy’s importance to her publishing house.
After initially “circling each other like fighters,” Talese said, she and Conroy spent a week with the pages from The Prince of Tides, spread across her office floor, going over the manuscript line by line, reducing it to publishable size.
The job wasn’t accomplished without a few “minor battles,” Conroy recalled, “which Nan always won. She did a ton of work, cutting 500 pages, but she did it so sweetly that I barely knew the blood was pouring out of my wrists.”
To judge by the novel’s run on best-seller lists, the bloodletting was not only painless but also highly profitable, for both Conroy and Talese’s publisher.
Editors as Money Managers
The literary agent David Miller, whose clients include Nicola Barker, Kate Summerscale, and Victoria Hislop, and who is a director at the Rogers, Coleridge & White agency, recounts a moment when he explained his job to a diplomat at an official function. “You mean,” she interjected after a while,
“that you’re a money manager in a very small slice of the leisure industry.”
Miller laughed when he told the story, but he was also realistic about the efforts the publishing industry must make to compete in a crowded marketplace.
Simultaneously, he believes — along with others — that “publishing is one of those businesses that is brilliant at thinking it’s perpetually at crisis point.” Therefore, it needs to loudly proclaim its virtues:
“In a world where digital publishing has made many people think that authors can go directly to an audience, publishers have been utterly rubbish at explaining what they do. And most of what they do is intrinsically invisible.”
The Editorial Process from the Writer’s Perspective
Miller had cause to examine the editor’s role from the other side when he published a short novel, Today, which was inspired in part by his passion for the life and work of Joseph Conrad.
His experience, he insisted, contradicts the idea that books are simply rushed through publishing houses; his editor at the independent Atlantic Books, Ravi Mirchandani, responded to the delivery of his 32,000-word manuscript with an editorial letter that ran to 20 pages.
It was, Miller said, “full of absolutely superb comments,” ranging from spotting anachronisms and continuity errors to inexact uses of language.
He adopted about 80% of the suggestions, then submitted to the attentions of “a completely brilliant” copy-editor and subsequently refined the book through four stages of proofs. “I have been totally heartened by the whole publishing process,” he said.
“I completely see why the book takes so long to go from the agent to the publishers to the bookseller to the customer. And I do not think I am rare.”
The Passionate Editors of Today
Indeed, many writers pay tribute to their editors. Linda Grant, the Booker-shortlisted novelist of We Had It So Good, spoke warmly of Lennie Goodings, the much-admired publisher at Virago, particularly her advice on changing characters and structure.
When I spoke to Goodings about editing, I got a strong sense that, for her, the process combines making practical assessments — such as whether a character has a sufficiently well-drawn and believable back-story — with allowing a more emotional and intuitive response to find its place. Of primary importance, she said,
“is finding out what the writer thought they wanted to do.”
Other highly acclaimed editors include Dan Franklin and Robin Robertson at Jonathan Cape, Mary Mount at Viking, Sara Holloway at Granta, Nicholas Pearson at Fourth Estate, Jenny Uglow at Chatto & Windus, Simon Prosser at Hamish Hamilton, and Neil Belton at Faber.
It seems clear that commitment and passion among publishing professionals exist in both large multinational corporations and small independent companies.
The Challenges Faced by Modern Editors
Peter Straus has experienced the business from more than one angle. In 2002, he moved from Macmillan, where he had been the publisher of Picador for 12 years and then the head of adult trade imprints for the entire company, to become an agent at Rogers, Coleridge & White, where he represents writers including Kate Atkinson, Don Paterson, Alexander Masters, Carol Ann Duffy, and Colm Tóibín.
Regarded in the industry as one of the most passionate advocates for new writing, he is also an enthusiastic book collector; realistic about the difficulties presented by the business, he is a great defender of its history.
Consequently, he is realistic about some of the more challenging aspects of the editor’s life. “It’s the kind of business,” he said,
“where as soon as an author reaches a tipping point and becomes a big brand, other forces come into play. Sales, marketing, and publicity departments want that author’s next book as soon as possible, and it takes its place in budgets and forecasts.”
He recalled an example from his time at Picador when Helen Fielding delivered the follow-up to the vast-selling Bridget Jones’s Diary; such was the appetite for The Edge of Reason that the editorial team and Fielding herself worked day and night to finalise the manuscript. In other circumstances, he said, the same work would have been carried out, but at a more leisurely pace.
He is confident that there are as many talented editors in publishing as there always have been but notes that,
“the interesting thing is whether the editor has the same level of influence in a publishing house as they had 20 years ago, or whether publishing is more led by sales and marketing.”
He argued that there is a feeling that out of sight is out of mind, and especially with authors who have had success with an earlier book or who have voracious readerships, such as those often enjoyed by genre writers, it’s good to keep the shelves steadily and plentifully supplied. It is, he said, “a savage marketplace now”.
The increasingly global nature of publishing means that an editor might also be pulled in several different directions at once, with editors in different territories each wanting their say.
Editors as Readers
Sam Leith, the journalist whose first novel, The Coincidence Engine, was published by Bloomsbury and was included in Waterstone’s pick of the 11 best debut novels of the year, describes himself as being “hugely grateful and impressed” by both his publisher, Michael Fishwick, and his copy-editor, who picked up an “egregious howler” that saw one of his characters enter a room from a corridor and then exit it, via the same door, onto a balcony.
“I very much welcomed somebody telling me something I hadn’t thought of or secretly knew. With very rare exceptions, I think everybody benefits from being edited. Probably an editor who is a sensitive, ordinary reader will do a lot of good.”
Leith’s remarks remind one that editors, before they are anything else, are avid readers.
One of the most celebrated editors of recent decades, Robert Gottlieb — whose long list of charges includes Joseph Heller, John le Carré, Toni Morrison, and John Cheever, and who also edited the New Yorker — insisted in a Paris Review interview that
“editing is simply the application of the common sense of any good reader.”
In the same piece, he also spoke against the “glorification of editors”, insisting that “the editor’s relationship to a book should be an invisible one.”
Diana Athill, now herself an acclaimed writer, declared in her memoir of her life as an editor, Stet, that “good publishers are supposed to ‘discover’ writers, and perhaps they do. To me, however, they just happened to come.”
It was surely, however, talent as much as good fortune that brought VS Naipaul, Norman Mailer, and Jean Rhys to Athill’s door. Great editors are more than good readers — but an appreciation of the qualities of serious literature, often hard to define, is a starting point, not an optional extra.
The Commodification of Books
The concern about falling standards probably also reflects a certain amount of regret that the world of letters so brilliantly evoked by Athill in Stet has faded.
The demands of a global marketplace, the advent of digitisation, and the increased importance of sales, publicity, and marketing have all contributed to changing the face of an industry that quietly congratulated itself on its genteel bohemianism.
Writers, except for the most financially successful, must maintain the solitary intensity of their creative life while adapting to new realities;
“they are now often advised to add mastery of social media to the publication round of interviews, readings, and festival appearances, and many take on a heavy load of teaching to supplement their earnings.”
Publishing in its popular incarnation — the legendary long lunches, the opportunistic punts on unheard-of but brilliant young writers, the smoke-filled parties and readings — is probably gone for good. Much to my chagrin!
Conclusion
Something, undoubtedly, has been lost, as it is being in other media. It is not uncommon, if you are of a certain disposition, to fling a book across the room and wonder if there is anyone still alive who cares about hanging participles or the difference between that and which, or the fact that “whose” is a relative pronoun.
Neither is it unusual to find a slender volume that seems short-changed by its brevity or an enormous one stuffed with extraneous material. And the associated experiences of being what the industry calls a “heavy reader” have also changed.
To buy a book, whether in a physical or virtual bookshop, is to navigate an obstacle course of special offers and money-off deals designed to make you buy more, not better; in the case of ebooks, the retailers’ first aim is to sell you a device, with hugely discounted books as the bait.
Finding out what book you want has also changed; although there is still plenty of high-quality literary criticism available, there is no doubt that there has been a shift away from the painstaking analysis of words and sentences and towards straightforward plot recital and a speedy thumbs up or down. If these peripheral factors are not directly linked to standards of editing, they are surely indicators of the extent to which books have been commodified.
The word may still be the thing, but it isn’t the only thing.
I strongly believe we must remember that the creation of literature — whatever the degree of collaboration between author and editor — is the result of enormously concentrated mental and aesthetic effort.
If it is reduced to a series of narrative effects slapped onto paper or screen, if it comes to be seen simply as one among many interchangeable ways to ingest a story, it will soon begin to look like a very poor thing indeed.
