The Lost Art of Book Editing [Article]

I sometimes think the Guardian just dreams their articles, and the writers don't actually live in the real world. Or many everything is done differently over there. But this article, like so many I read there, simply has no relationship whatsoever to the real world of publishing I work in.

So UK pubs don't edit manuscripts Gothic? (or are less rigorous about it?) I find that hard to believe...

The art of editing is alive and well. Maybe the Guardian writers should read better books

I felt the article concluded that the art of editing wasn't lost. Just that nobody really knew it was still going on.

The article could do with some editing.

There's a great book, and the name escapes me, which shows how Ken Follett's Man From St. Petersburg was edited. You get the draft, some commentary and then how it turned out. Quite illuminating.

Regards

Whacko

Just today I was reading a book and thought, no no NO, you should have recrafted that sentence so that the significant words were right at the end.

Editing never ends.

I initially replied to this article and later deleted the post becaue I thought I was being snarky. But after this very same article came up with my MA class this week - including comments from my tutor who was a senior editor at Little, Brown UK - he said it was one of the best articles on editing and publishing that he has read, I don't think we should dismiss it

I talked it over with some friends last night and this morning, and interestingly the same thoughts kept coming up,

Part of the conversation raised the following :

It was thought that the rise in commercial fiction has seen a general decrease in the editing that goes into books. The reasoning behind this is because commerical fiction is seen as a quick fix, something that might be about for a year or two, and then is gone. Literary fiction is generally considered to be something that is going to hang around for a lot longer. And so lit fic gets more editing time and attention than commerical fiction, and is more likely to get that old word by word edit than commerical fiction, which doesn't have to be perfect, just good enough.

I'm not really sure where I stand on this, as I can see the logic behind that. Publishing has changed a huge amount in recent years and is no longer what it was 5 years ago, or 10, 20 40 years ago.

How often do we have threads or comments on this very forum about the apparent lack of editing that seems to go into some books?

I know that I have had good editors and I have had bad editors. I have had my work torn apart word by word, and equally I have had whole meetings with editors who didn't seem to have read my work at all.

Can't help feeling they've got it arse-about backwards. Commercial, ie popular, fiction is far more likely to be around in a hundred years than literary stuff simply because the latter has a smaller and less eclectic readership.

Dickens for instance wasn't writing litfic for an elite; he was writing serials that were read and enjoyed by thousands of people, and still are. It's interesting that you can really see the difference between the works of his that were edited for publication as novels and those that weren't.

If you want the reader to enjoy their commercial fiction, editing out those HUH? moments that interrupt the read and throw the consumer out of the moment is surely a must. Seems a bit circular to produce less than your best work, then say, see? it doesn't have lasting appeal.

Okay, confession.
Some years ago—okay, many years ago—I was an editor for a nonfiction publisher. Each editor had six-twelve books to get into print each six-month cycle.

There was no way the editor could devote the kind of attention to each book that would make it excellent.

You had to look at the manuscripts on your desk and think, "This one is schlock and it's never going to be anything else. Let's just get the grammar straightened out and send it to the printer. This one is pretty good. A few revisions and it could be really good. Let's work with the author. And then this one could be truly excellent. I'll spend my time on this one."

It was all a matter of economics, and I doubt things have changed.

If you want to write a great book, you are going to have to do it on your own. You can't expect an editor to have the leisure to work with you. Maxwell Perkins is history.

Thanks for the insight, Lil. Very helpful! I'm sure nothing has changed, or very little. I must admit that as a first timer, I am a big fan of getting both my manuscript and proposal edited before I even start think about querying agents. It comes at a huge cost but I think it is necessary. Every book I've read, the author thanks an editor or two or three. I suspect many of those editors are privately-commissioned. With the cut-throat competition and bookstores in big trouble, I am aiming to minimize my chance of rejection.

Buffysquirrel said:

Can't help feeling they've got it arse-about backwards. Commercial, ie popular, fiction is far more likely to be around in a hundred years than literary stuff simply because the latter has a smaller and less eclectic readership.

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This is true. I have little doubt that some of Stephen King's works will be regarded as classics 100 years from now.

That said, I would not be surprised if it is true that less effort goes into editing popular fiction than into editing literary fiction, but if so, I don't think the reason is a realistic sense of the temporal. I think it's a sense that the audience won't be as discerning, that they won't care as much about imperfect editing, that they will buy a known name anyway, and that it therefore is not worth an immense investment of editing time and money. If more time is indeed given to literary fiction, then I would guess there is also probably an element of snobbery involved.

But any decline in editing could also be easily linked to the sheer increase in the volume of novels being published. Resources only stretch so far. There are only so many good editors in the world, and given the state of the modern education system, I don't think that talent pool has had any reason to have increased in recent times. If there are many more works being published, then there just aren't enough good editors to go around, and mediocre ones will enter the field.