Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do (7 page)

Always remember that you are being watched and judged by your colleagues and by your publisher, by authors, agents, booksellers, critics, and reviewers. They will rate you not on any single success or failure, but on your overall batting average. Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Mickey Mantle, and Roger Maris became world-famous champions by batting between .300 and .400—or somewhere between three and four hits for every ten times at bat. Therefore, within reasonable limits, you can luxuriate in integrity by acting with courage, with imagination, and above all, with the creative motivation that means fulfillment.

Editing can, and should be, not only a life-enhancing profession but also a liberal education in itself, for it gives you the privilege of working with the most creative people of your time: authors and educators, world-movers and world-shakers. For taking a lifetime course for which you would be willing to pay tuition, you are paid, not merely with dollars, but with intellectual and spiritual satisfactions immeasurable.

Richard Curtis

R
ICHARD
C
URTIS
has been a successful literary agent for over thirty years. His monthly column has appeared in
Locus,
a science-fiction trade publication, for over a dozen years. It has served as the basis for two books
, How to be Your Own Literary Agent
and
Beyond the Bestseller.
He is also the author of some fifty other books of fiction and nonfiction. He has received an Edgar Award nomination for his first mystery novel and two awards from
Playboy
for his humor pieces
.

“It takes as much courage to love a book, in many ways, as it does to love a person, and sometimes there is as much at stake. But there can be no love without responsibility, and no responsibility without fortitude,” says Richard Curtis in this revision of his controversial, trenchant essay, which is every bit as challenging as its provocative title. Noting that today the trade book editor spends more time acquiring than line editing, he finds that “whether we like it or not, the responsibility for well-edited books is shifting to authors.” Mr. Curtis recognizes that the multiple roles editors must play in today’s complex publishing industry make them “professional company men and women” but urges them to maintain their editorial integrity and convictions by fighting hard for the writers they believe in, for the books they feel must be published. “If editors are to remain more than entertaining luncheon hosts, if they are to be not merely necessary but indispensable, they will have to continue resisting the pressures toward homogeneity and mediocrity that are arrayed against them by the monolith of Big Publishing.”

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the decline of editing. These are fighting words.

The problem with evaluating this allegation is that everything editors do today is invidiously compared to the accomplishments of that quintessential master, Maxwell Perkins. Perkins practiced his art at the offices of Charles Scribner’s Sons from 1914 until late in the 1940s and midwifed the masterpieces of such immortals as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Wolfe. “Where are today’s Maxwell Perkinses?” is the plaintive cry of authors who discover horrifying grammatical, syntactical, factual, and typographical errors in their freshly minted books, or, worse, have them gleefully pointed out by friends and critics. Every such erratum is a rebuke to the hallowed memory of that figure who has been depicted as gracious, patient, erudite, nurturing, precise, demanding, polite, and modest, a man whose love of authors was exceeded only by his love of good and well-made books. Let’s assume that he truly did possess all of the virtues ascribed to him, and more if you wish.

I have no desire to desecrate either his memory or his achievements. I just don’t happen to think that “Where are today’s Maxwell Perkinses?” is a very good question. It oversimplifies editing both then and now, and fails to take into account the fact that today’s editors simply don’t perform the same tasks that their forebears did. I know a number of great editors working today, but they’re great in many significantly different ways from the great editors of yesteryear.

Just about every aspect of publishing has changed since Perkins’s era. The types of books published are different. Agents exert far more influence. The paperback industry has revolutionized the marketing of books. Computers and word processors have been created and refined. Bookstore chains have become a dominant force in the marketplace. Printing technology has improved immensely. Books today are not acquired, edited, produced, printed, or distributed the same way they were earlier in this century. They are not even written the same way.

We must also define “editors” before we apply the word irresponsibly. Editing is a highly complex set of functions, and no single individual is capable of exercising them with equal aplomb. The editor who wines and dines agents and charms authors may be a clumsy negotiator; the brilliant dealmaker may have no patience for the tedious and demanding word-byword task of copy editing; the copy editor who brilliantly brings a book to life word by word, line by line, may be completely at sixes and sevens when it comes to handling authors.

It is certainly easy to wax nostalgic about editing in the Good Old Days (which really ended only about twenty or twenty-five years ago). If accounts and memoirs of that era can be trusted, editors then were steeped in fine arts, philosophy, languages, and the classics. They were a breed of compulsively orderly and fanatically precise individuals who ruthlessly stalked and destroyed typos, solecisms, and factual inaccuracies, and who conducted prodigious debates with authors about linguistic nuances. Their pride in their labors matched—and sometimes exceeded—that of the authors themselves. And when it came to money—well, they placed literature high above crass commerce, and discussed author compensation with the same delicacy they reserved for childbearing.

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, a book critic for the
New York Times
, in an article about the vanishing breed of editors, quoted Harper and Row editor Dolores Simon as observing that “… there simply isn’t the old interest in grammatical precision among young people any more.” And Joseph Smith, an editor at Simon & Schuster, said that although good editors are still coming into our business, they are not “fastidious” in that “quaint way” we associate with oak-paneled editorial offices of yore. Lehmann-Haupt, himself a former editor, described strolls through Times Square in which he obsessively edited billboards, neon signs, the printing on the sides of trucks, and even sidewalk graffiti. David Leavitt, in his novel
The Lost Language of Cranes
, captured the ideal editor’s profile, describing her as driven by the instinct “to put the world in order” and “possessed of the rare capacity to sit all day in a small cubicle, like a monk in a cell, and read with an almost penitential rigor.”

Trumbull Rogers, a free-lance technical copy editor writing in the “My Say” opinion column of
Publishers Weekly
, observed:

When I landed my first job in publishing in 1970, my boss sat me down at a desk and told me to spend the first day learning the house style. The style was important because all the articles I would copyedit had to conform to it—no exceptions. The emphasis of my training was on economy and clarity of marking…, accuracy and attention to details. Although the journals were set in hot metal, we still made punctuation corrections in page proof, a very expensive process, but we felt it was worth it to create a product we could be proud of.

Today’s editor, industry critics claim, no longer has that pride and painstaking compulsiveness. Indeed, it has been contended, editors today do everything but edit. The nurturing of authors has given way to the acquisition of properties. Editorial taste and judgment have been replaced by the
application of success formulas devised by editorial committees. Risk taking, hunches, and commercial instincts have yielded to the conservative application of bottom-line buying policies dictated by bookstore chain managers and implemented by rigid computer programs. The new breed of editorial animal, it is asserted, looks down his or her nose at line editing and production details. The time and money pressures of today’s monolithic and highly competitive publishing business have devalued good bookmaking. The result is books that fall apart, prematurely yellow with age, and are scandalously rife with typos. “Years ago,” Rogers wrote (his “My Say” piece was entitled “On the Road to Mediocrity”), “you rarely saw a typo in a book; now you rarely pick up
any
book that isn’t riddled with every imaginable kind of error.”

Invited to comment on the transformation of the editing profession over the last few decades, author Harlan Ellison had this to say:

In large measure because of the niggardly wages paid to entry-level personnel, the caliber of daring, intelligence, and expertise has decreased alarmingly over the past twenty-five years, in my opinion. With the takeover of this “gentleman’s sport” by multinational corporations obsessed by the bottom line, those rare urbane individuals who looked on editing as a holy calling have vanished. Priced out of the market. The Maxwell Perkinses, Walter Fultzes, Ben Hibbses and others are no longer with us, nor will the arena permit their sort to reappear. Now, with editors being drawn from a pool of business school graduates, we find entry-level editorial personnel who are semiliterate and understand debentures better than declensions.

Editorial success today means climbing the corporate ladder, passing through the sweaty environs of editorial responsibility. But it is, sadly, a case of the lame leading the halt; because most of the people with whom these arrivistes must work are already working writers. So where is the guiding intelligence a writer looks to in his or her editor? In my view, with modern technology overtaking the scutwork of editorial responsibility, virtually the only value an editor has for a professional writer (first novelists are another matter) is in the generation of “in-house interest,” the ramrodding and championing of a book through the labyrinth of publishing house indifference, ineptitude, and chance. And when the editor hasn’t the in-house rep or clout to get that enthusiasm translated into promotional and advertising dollars his/her value is damned near zero.

Ellison’s criticisms go true to the mark, as they usually do. But they must also be evaluated in a larger context.

Unquestionably, a shift has taken place in the role of trade book editors from what is generally characterized as line functions to that of acquisitions. The earlier role, the one that we most sentimentalize, combined nurturing parent and stern taskmaster, a person who could get a great book out of an author, then groom and curry the text until it virtually sparkled. Although editors then, as now, worked for publishers whose profit agenda seldom coincided with that of their authors, the editor was thought of as the author’s friend, protector, and advocate.

The emphasis today on the acquisition role of editors places them in a more adversarial role with authors. Negotiation often pits them against each other, and the residue of resentment and distrust that remains after the bargain is sealed makes it difficult for authors to feel completely comfortable with their editors.

The paternalistic treatment of authors by editors in earlier times, however, produced its own set of inequities, for publishers took advantage of many authors who were too ignorant, shy, or well bred to demand good terms of their editors. Knowing that most authors write for love, publishers tended to assume that they didn’t need to write for money.

Resentment toward publishers over their exploitation of authors created the conditions for the rise to power of literary agents, and though new authors today are still at a disadvantage, the balance eventually shifts when they engage agents and become more successful. Good agents often insist on a large measure of control over the author-editor relationship, holding authors at arm’s length from their editors to protect them from being taken advantage of. And what has happened in the four or five decades since this transformation occurred is that the agents have begun to take over the role formerly played by editors. Today’s agents nurture authors, work closely with them in the development of their work, perform a great many editorial tasks, and lend strong emotional and psychological support. And, perhaps most important of all, in a turbulent world of publishing mergers and takeovers and editorial musical chairs, agents have become the islands of stability and reliability that were once the province of editors. So, if the importance of editors in this respect has diminished, the loss has not necessarily affected authors for the worse.

Or, take the tasks of copyediting manuscripts and proofreading galleys. Although these still fall upon the employees of publishing companies, the high costs of running businesses have caused a shift from in-house line editing to free-lance work done at home. Many copy editors are former employees of publishers who have managed to adapt their responsibilities
to their domestic schedules. But the pressures of producing large numbers of books annually have forced publishers to overload editors with work or to seek less-experienced people to do these highly demanding jobs. Some publishers just can’t afford the time or expense to train copy editors, supervise them closely, review their work, and instill in them a grasp of house style, a knowledge of company tradition, and a sense of pride. English is not even the first language for many copy editors. And those who are fluent in English may not have the patience, precision, and skill to be good editors.

Whether we like it or not, the responsibility for well-edited books is shifting to authors. Actually, they have always borne much of that burden. In hardcover publishing particularly, most authors are given the opportunity (if not the contractual right) to review copyedited manuscripts and to proofread galleys, and if an author doesn’t care enough to double-check every fact, even dubious grammatical construction and spelling, indeed every word of his manuscript and galleys, he has no one to blame but himself for a flawed product.