Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do (3 page)

As I prepared to write this Preface, I thought long and hard for the right words to sum up my feelings about forty years of editing, but I realized that my delight in and dedication to the world of books and authors is as strong today as I expressed it in the following quote from the Preface to the 1985 revised edition of
Editors on Editing
, a portion of which also appeared in the Preface to the 1962 original edition. I believe I will feel the same way until
the last day of my life as a working editor, which will probably also be the last day of my life. Period.

…

It is my hope that this book will attract many more bright, creative men and women to the profession of editing. It is not a career for everyone. “Of that,” to quote Mr. W. S. Gilbert, “there is no possible shadow of doubt whatever.” For the frustrated writer, editing other writers could prove to be excruciating torture and put a damper on one’s own creative efforts. For the dilettante “who just loves good books” but who has little knowledge of or concern for the reading trends and tastes of readers, editing can prove to be a most traumatically disillusioning experience. For the young man or woman who believes editing means endless rounds of glamorous cocktail parties with literary lions, and access to unlimited expense accounts, a few months in an entry-level job will disabuse him or her very, very quickly.

So much for what editing is not. It is, for one attuned to its demands and responsibilities and often tedious tasks, a most rewarding career—fully as creative, imaginative, and satisfying as being a writer. And some editors might even go so far as to say, “More so.”

In my long career as an editor, I have been always fascinated, sometimes inspired and exhilarated, occasionally frustrated and disappointed, but never, never bored. I have looked upon my years as an editor as analogous to being a perpetually stimulated student who is attending a nonstop, incredibly diverse series of courses at the world’s largest, and always expanding, university. I learn from editing each author more about the subject of his or her book than I had ever known before. Publishing has permitted me to meet unusual, even spellbinding and truly unforgettable people, some of whom are professional colleagues and some among my roster of authors. My need for creative self-expression has been more than amply satisfied by the editing I have done on many, many books and by the pleasure I have always experienced from getting a good and valuable book from a fine author. I still get a charge of exhilaration when I receive the advance copies of a book I have worked on for a year (and sometimes two). I look at that book and remember, perhaps, that it all began as an idea over lunch, or an outline and a chapter or two. I am proud of the contribution I have made to helping that idea come to fruition, to helping that outline and chapter grow into an important or entertaining book, one that the author and I believe will be in print for many, many years. I have never lost this involvement and commitment and pride in being an editor and I hope I never shall.

This book was compiled with a devotion and care that I hope express my deepest feelings about the profession of editing. I have loved it from the
beginning and I love it even more now, after forty years of joy, fulfillment, grief, and frustration. I still am eager and excited as I begin to read yet another proposal, dip into yet another novel, hear about a fresh and innovative writer. May this new edition inspire would-be (and currently practicing) editors to similar heights of dedication and delight. May authors who read this book discover that the editor-author relationship need not be and should not be an adversarial one. At its best, it can be an unforgettably rewarding collaboration. Finally, I hope that the general reader will discover the subtle, complex, and often ineffable factors that inspire both editor and author to give unstintingly of their time and their talents to that singular act of creation—the book.

Croton-on-Hudson, New York
October 1992

Alan D. Williams

Now an editorial consultant, A
LAN
D. W
ILLIAMS
has held editorial and executive positions at a number of publishing houses, his major tenure having been two decades at Viking Press as managing editor and editorial director. His last post was as publisher of Grove Weidenfeld. During his career he has worked equally in both fiction and nonfiction with authors as varied as Isaiah Berlin, Stephen King, Tom Wicker, Iris Murdoch, Frederick Forsyth, Nadine Gordimer, and the Reverend Charlie W. Shedd
.

The editor as hunter-gatherer? As therapist-nag? As magic worker-meddler? Which of these is the best editor for a writer to have? Which is the most effective approach to editing an editor can take? Check
all
of the above whether writer or editor. For in fact these are only a few of the editor’s vital functions, suggests Alan D. Williams in his irreverent and witty quest for the answer to the question, What is an editor?

Is there no respite from all this role playing? No, but do not assume the editor is unhappy and put-upon. In truth, being so many things to so many people is all part of the fun and games and challenge of editing. For as Mr. Williams wisely says: “The day that an editor picks up a manuscript without
some
sense of anticipation is probably the last day he or she should be at work.”

An editor is so many things to so many people that this rhetorically questioning heading is virtually impossible to answer in any concise form. In addition, any one editor is likely to be cut from such radically different cloth from the next one that generalizing about character, somatotype, background, interests, or whatever would be as meaningless as grouping them by eye color. If form eludes us, then, function should be where we look for unifying aspects, and for those elements toward which writers peer in trepidation or hope, aversion or gratitude, contempt or respect and even affection.

Editors in publishing houses can be perceived as basically performing three different roles, all of them simultaneously. First they must find and select the books the house is to publish. Second, they edit (yes, Virginia, they still do edit, no matter what cries you hear about bottom lines, heartless conglomerates, and the defeat of taste by commerce). And third, they perform the Janus-like function of representing the house to the author and the author to the house.

The first function—the editor as hunter-gatherer—is the one most vital to the editor’s own reputation and advancement, a point writers might particularly keep in mind. Editors
want
books; they are not there to demonstrate condescension to submitted writings, despite the flash of indignation experienced by almost everyone receiving a rejection letter. Indeed, the day that an editor picks up a manuscript without
some
sense of anticipation is probably the last day he or she should be at work. Whatever the endless winnowing (and it is estimated that only one in fifty manuscripts or proposals is accepted), the highest moments of exhilaration in an editor’s professional life come with discovery and acquisition.

Authors know how
they
are individually discovered, but even they can have only an incomplete idea of how wide the plains of editorial search can be. Agents are of course the first conduit that springs to mind, and it is true that in the last fifty years more than 80 percent of all trade books were, by informal estimate, agented. (It is also a truism that it is as difficult to find a good agent as a good publisher, which supposedly presents the aspiring writer with a classic chicken-and-egg dilemma. But it should be remembered that the agent has many potential outlets and the acquiring editor but one, so that the former can play with many more possibilities and talents than the latter.)

The earth has circled the sun many times since a well-known publisher
could display on his office wall a beautifully wrought needlepoint sampler reading “The relationship between publisher and agent is that of knife to throat.” Cultivation of agents occupies a significant portion of an editor’s waking hours, nor should this be thought of as seeking out dueling opponents. Instead, editor and agent are better perceived as two points of a triangle, the author obviously being the third. No one editor can conceivably “cover” all agents, so that as time goes by both sides gravitate more and more to the individuals they have successfully done business with before, and with whom they tend to have common interests. And yes, the burgeoning of these relationships not necessarily, but often, begins over that much-abused institution the business lunch, undisturbed by telephone or fax.

Of course, editors must cast their nets beyond the worlds of New York and California agenting, both for further gleanings and for their own fulfillment. Writers’ conferences, creative writing courses, university campuses at large, magazines both literary and popular, writers who know your writers, scouting trips at home and abroad, foreign publishers—these are only some of the fields to be tilled. Luck certainly plays a part, but even there, some skein of logical happenstance has usually put one in the way of meeting and acquisition. Simply living in a university town for many years afforded me encounters with a number of admirable authors. And it should be noted that after one published book, the unagented author, sometimes even at the suggestion of the publisher, more often than not ties up with an agent. Agents too are hunter-gatherers.

Special mention should go to the books that are thought up by editors, usually works of nonfiction. The word will go out that a certain writer is looking for an idea, and an editor may have just the right biography or current controversy in mind. Or the editor may conceive it in the first place and try it on a likely author. (A famous example was Cecil Scott of Macmillan suggesting the subject of what became
The Guns of August
to Barbara Tuchman.) Series are another device joining authors to contracts they had not anticipated, and they are often the product of the fertile mind of an editor or publisher. To renowned editor Jason Epstein in his Doubleday days goes credit for inventing a whole new genre of publishing, the trade paperback.

Then there are editorial meetings, forums of electric inspiration, Athenian discourse, mutual support—also of backbiting, grandstanding, and the sort of compliments that are thinly veiled put-downs. They are, in short, strictly mortal conclaves. However, beyond the requisite items of agenda and record keeping, they vary as much from house to house as the individuals themselves, from a highly formal tribune of decision to a free-for-all devoted in considerable part to trade gossip. No matter what their
nature, they tend to define editors in their singularity, especially in terms of what proposals, suggestions, opinions, and brain-picks they choose to bring to a meeting. Collectively, the editorial meeting says much about publishers in terms of the weight and credence given to the editorial sector as well as to individual editors, the process of decision, even the spirit and morale of the house. Though they are discreet in nature, ideally restricted to editorial folk except by invitation to colleagues in marketing, subsidiary rights, publicity, and other departments, prospective or aspiring authors can learn much about a publisher by some discreet querying of their own.

The second function is the editor as therapist-nag or magic worker-meddler. However he or she is regarded, an editor is, or should be, doing something that almost no friend, relative, or even spouse is qualified or willing to do, namely to read every line with care, to comment in detail with absolute candor, and to suggest changes where they seem desirable or even essential. In doing this the editor is acting as the first truly disinterested reader, giving the author not only constructive help but also, one hopes, the first inkling of how reviewers, readers, and the marketplace (especially for nonfiction) will react, so that the author can revise accordingly.

…

Two basic questions the editor should be addressing to the author are: Are you saying what you want to say? and, Are you saying it as clearly and consistently as possible? If these sound narrow at first glance, think further. They cover everything from awkward syntax and repetition, to the destruction of a novel’s impact through a protagonist’s behavior so unexplained and unmotivated as to be unintentionally baffling. All of this is of course subject to free and extended discussion and the author is the ultimate arbiter, as all responsible editors would agree. They would also concur that knowing when to leave things alone is as high an editorial skill as knowing when to suggest revision.

Does all this always work out in a glow of amity and constructive engagement? Certainly not, no more frequently than do love affairs. Overbearing, insensitive editors and mulish, unlistening authors, whether singly or in pairs, have caused many a shift of contract and failed book. Both species eventually tend to meet comeuppance and run out of partners. The more basic question, frequently alluded to in the press, and mentioned at the outset of this piece, is whether devoted editorial labor still takes place at all. This observer, at least, is convinced that it does, despite the undoubted increase in commercial pressure, the disappearance of the family (for which read: laid-back, kinder, gentler, in-it-for-literature) firm, and the swift currents of changing taste and accelerated technology. The fact is that the zest of the acquiring editor’s initial involvement can no more be separated from
concern about the finished product than flesh and blood from bone. In that sense, the editorial animal remains unchanged no matter what the economies, working conditions, or amenity slashes. Editors
do
care, or they wouldn’t be there.

The eclectic nature of editorial taste, particularly in relation to nonfiction, deserves special mention. A wise man once remarked, only partly in derision: “A good trade editor can talk about anything for five minutes and nothing for six.” It is absolutely true that catholic interests are a more important qualification than any one college major, including English. It is also an ill-kept secret that a few reasonably adroit questions directed at a prospective author of known enthusiasms can seduce the answerer into thinking his questioners know a lot more than they really do. On the other hand, as time goes by, most editors become singled out for certain known passions of their own, be it horses, opera, horse operas, great battles, sports, cuisine, or horticulture. Again, this is an element of compatibility a reasonably inquisitive writer should be able to figure out ahead of time.