Random Thoughts: On editing. By Linda Funnell
The conference centre at Mt Eliza.
As Peter Corris continues to recuperate, the NRB editors share their random thoughts. This week Linda writes about editing and the Residential Editorial Program.
People most often associate editing with things like spelling and grammar – getting rid of double negatives, tidying up dangling participles and making sure accommodation is spelt correctly.
All these things are important, of course, but for book editors working with fiction and creative non-fiction, they are but the tip of the iceberg – relatively straightforward matters compared to diagnosing a manuscript’s structural problems, checking for consistency of voice and internal logic, determining whether the story begins in the right place, if the characters are credible, the timeline plausible and whether the reader has been given too much or too little background information. Above all this kind of editing is about understanding the author’s intention and setting about finding ways to assist the author to realise it.
It’s a process that requires empathy and imagination as well as technical knowledge of how stories work, and it’s not often that editors get together to discuss their craft.
At the beginning of last month I was one of three mentors of a select group of mid-career book editors at the Residential Editorial Program, a week-long intensive development program held at Mt Eliza, on the shores of Port Phillip Bay.
The REP first ran in 1999 and has been held every two years since, with the exception of this year, which was run after a three-year break. Funding is always tight for a program like this, and it’s nothing short of a minor miracle that it has been able to continue with support from the Australia Council and the Australian Publishers Association.
It’s a unique program that focuses on editing fiction and creative non-fiction and on editors at mid-career. While there are numerous programs covering the basics of editing (many of them run by institutions such as RMIT, Sydney University and UTS, among many others), the REP is the only one for mid-career editors. The centrepiece of the program is the opportunity to workshop the edit of an unpublished manuscript – a rare opportunity indeed for an editor, and testament to the generosity of the authors who have allowed early drafts of their work to be used in the program over the years. The workshops are complemented by guest speakers, which this year included author, editor and publisher Sophie Cunningham, authors Jared Thomas, Ellen van Neerven and Maxine Beneba Clarke, publishers Eva Mills and Robert Watkins, and editor Nadine Davidoff.
Authors understand how important editors are to making their work the best it can be, but it’s not something that’s well understood in the broader publishing industry, where it’s more likely to be sales and marketing personnel who get the status and higher salaries within publishing companies. With some notable exceptions, the trend for publishers’ editorial budgets is down, not up.
As publishers squeeze editorial resources, increasingly authors are turning to freelance editors to fine-tune their manuscripts before submission. (Should you be looking for a freelance editor for your work, may I recommend the Freelance Editors Network to you.)
It’s a contrast to the situation in the US. Among the REP’s guest speakers was Annabel Blay, recipient of the 2015–16 Beatrice Davis Editorial Fellowship, a biennial award for an Australian editor to spend 10 weeks in New York pursuing a research project. Annabel set out to investigate how developmental and structural editing was done in the US.
Developmental editing is exactly what it sounds like – an editor helping an author develop a manuscript, exploring ideas, characters, themes and plots. Structural editing generally focuses on what the author has already created, and whether all the elements are working as they should.
Annabel’s account of US publishing and editing was fascinating (and here’s the link if you’d like to read her full report, Developing ourselves, developing our authors: developmental and structural editing of fiction in the US) , but I think we were all stopped in our tracks not just by the revelation that a number of New York editors preferred to edit on screen using four screens (surprising as that was) but by the fact that in the US it is not uncommon for a manuscript to go through seven or even eight rounds of editing. Some of these are done by the agent, some by the editor. While too little editorial attention is clearly undesirable, it’s impossible not to wonder whether having too much may create a new set of problems, with too many cooks spoiling the broth.
Nevertheless, whatever challenges the profession of editing faces in Australia, having spent time with the editors at the REP it’s impossible not to feel optimistic. Australian literature has skilled, sensitive and passionate hands to assist it into the world.
