This week brought an opportunity to help a friend by doing spot editing on his forthcoming book. His field is American art history, and it’s been fascinating to revisit this subject by engaging in an editorial volley with his mind.
I choose the word “volley” cause that’s what an editor does: he receives the punch of a writer’s words, absorbs their impact, and tosses them back with every pointed question or objection possible.
The word “edit” emerges in the medieval period when the Latin verb edicere meant to proclaim, publish, or give out (in oral or manuscript format, of course, since the printing press had not yet been invented). The word always connoted something solemn.
And editing is serious business. Serious and exciting. For while it may sound staid, the process tingles with energy. Some type of highway always connects a writer with his reader. But the channel connecting a writer with an editor resembles less a highway and more the magnetic path of a superconductor.
At least, that’s how I try to edit. I read as if each word is hitting me directly in the face. If the words don’t bump me off the path, I keep reading. But if I’m jarred, then I stop and try to figure out why. And then I sling each concern back at the writer.
Sounds a bit brutal, doesn’t? It can be. Frankly, it’s far more fun to be the editor than the person edited.
My pedigree in editing stems from the mind-boggling experiences I had while writing my dissertation at The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in the early 1980s. Enjoying some of the best fortune of my life, I had snagged Dr. Howard Smither as my advisor. A man admired world-wide for his meticulous scholarship and beautiful prose, Dr. Smither’s magnum opus will sit forever on the shelves of every good music library: an elegant four-volume history of the oratorio.
In another post I’ll share the story of how I came to be his advisee (believe me, it was not a given). And also I’ll tell you his biting, if hilarious, editorial reaction to reading the draft of my first chapter (hint: the setting was a shuttered ice-cream parlor in Cologne, Germany).
For now, suffice it to say that Dr. Smither was the first person who took every word I wrote seriously, both mechanically and conceptually. Not only did sentences have to be perfect, or at least excellent, but each word had to mean something. Consistency and accuracy in every detail was required. Each word or phrase needed to earn its place in the prose by doing something useful, beautiful, or interesting.
So, if I wrote the word “overall,” then I’d better mean overall. If I started a clause with “probably,” then the following words better reveal something fluid or indefinite.
Beyond that, every sentence needed to make sense to the reader. I had to find a voice that met the reader where he was, but still presumed the reader’s high level of intelligence and imagination. Unprepared leaps in material were taboo. So too were phrases or sentences that I particularly liked or found clever, but that did not serve the prose.
No one had ever cast such an eye over my writing. Not even close. And it was rough going for a long time. Let’s just say that I’ve kept boxes of many corrected drafts. Occasionally I haul them out and reenter the magic world of his humane, uplifting editing.
So as we teach our children the concepts of writing, a life-long process, we might do well to teach them more about editing. Give them chances to receive and analyze prose in the active mode of the critical editor. They can edit each other (kids are notoriously brutal to each other in such situations); they can edit the ubiquitous bad prose we find in publications and on websites today; or they can edit us.
You might be surprised how attentively, if not well, they do it, because they are literal readers.
Even a simple exercise or two in editing will teach a student that the byline on a title page “editor” means something of value. And repeated forays into the world of editing do help students develop an inner editor, a voice that continually asks uncomfortable questions like, “Is this working?” “Is this correct and well-formed?” And most importantly, “Is this delivering what I intend to say to my reader?” Boring it is not, nor is it easy. But the rewards last a lifetime.
