“Seeing” the book: editing as a creative act

 

The following is a chapter excerpted from Editors Talk about Editing, by Susan Greenberg. Published in 2015 by Peter Lang Inc., the chapter includes a brief introduction by Greenberg, followed by an interview with Constance Hale. We have retained the original British spellings and style choices.

 

Chapter 10: Constance Hale

Constance Hale is an articulate advocate for the editing arts, and a founding member of the editors’ collective The Prose Doctors. In a long career as reporter, writer, and editor, she combines an editorial practice with postgraduate teaching at Harvard and University of California at Berkeley.

The interview, held in a noisy café in Brooklyn’s Dumbo, was snatched during a book tour taking Hale away from her home in Oakland, California. She was in New York to promote her latest title, Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch (2012). This follows Sin and Syntax (2013; first published in 1999) and a Wired stylebook (1999).

Hale’s experience provides insights into the teaching of editing culture and skills, and the devolution of editing from traditional publishing houses. She occupies a particular spot in the ‘circuit of communication’: as she puts it, ‘I’m usually hired as a developmental editor for a book that has been more or less accepted for publication, and I know what the publisher wants from the book.’

SG Would you call editing creative?

CH Absolutely. I go through a process of needing to ‘see’ the book. That’s the only way I can put it. I hold the book in my head and I get to a point where I have a vision of the book. And then I edit from that vision. Coming up with the vision is a creative act. It’s an act of imagination.

By the time a writer comes to me, he or she is a little lost. The writer had a vision of the story when starting out, but in the process of writing loses that vision, or gets lost in the material. So the editor has to come with a fresh vision that is sufficiently close to the writer’s original vision, but the editor has to do a bit of the imagining as well.

SG I’d like to bring out in these interviews what editors actually do…

CH Would you like me to describe my process when editing a book? I have an absolutely clear, practised process.

The first thing I do is to meet the writer informally and get to know the writer as a person, before I have read the manuscript. So the interaction is not tainted by any judgment on my part, or anxiety on the writer’s part. And I say to the writer, ‘I want our first conversation to be just you and me, getting to know each other.’ And then I ask the writer what it is that he or she is trying to achieve – the most important thing – and what’s the greatest frustration, and if there is anything that he or she wants me to look at, in particular.

And then I read the manuscript. I’m a compulsive editor so I try to sit on my hands and just take it in, and not start editing before I’ve read the whole thing. Maybe I’ll take a few notes, but the first read is about seeing what I have on my plate.

Often an editor at the publishing house has hired me. I know what the publishing house thinks. Sometimes there’s been a peer review process. I don’t read the peer reviews until after I’ve read the manuscript myself, the first time. That first read I want to be absolutely open, naïve, uncontaminated, and I’m reading it as a reader. I tell writers I am a proxy for the reader.

By the time I start the second read, I’ve got some ideas about the major weaknesses and strengths. So the second read is to identify those, and work them out. The second read, I’m really drilling down. I do a lot of line-editing; I move things around. I start tabulating notes. I mark up the copy a lot and prepare a memo as I go along.

And then I schedule a chat with the author. If there’s another editor involved, I involve that editor in that chat as well. By this time I have articulated my vision. This conversation is about me saying: ‘Here’s what I see, here are the problems I have identified, and here’s what I want to do. Here’s my roadmap.’ It’s very important that I have a roadmap, so the writer feels that someone is coming in with positive suggestions.

Before I lay out my roadmap, I have a stock set of questions that we usually go through. I write up a paragraph summarising what I think the book is about – these are the themes, this is what I think we have in front of us. And I ask, ‘Did I get it right, did I miss something?’ I’m trying to be a mirror, I’m trying to reflect back to the writer ‘this is what I see’, in the most sensitive and articulate way I can. The writer is usually relieved to hear that someone ‘gets’ what she or he is trying to do. Then I ask a set of questions about readership: who is your audience – primary, secondary, tertiary. So we have a conversation about that. I usually do that because I often find that the author’s stance as a narrator, and the voice, shifts around a lot. I point this out and ask, “Who are you talking to? Let’s be really specific about it.’ A lot of people think they are writing for a general audience – they want that, because they want their book to be a bestseller. But unconsciously, they are writing for their peers. And so I explain about tone and language, and a lot of things that flow out of understanding who your audience is, and speaking to your audience.

Usually, in this conversation, we also talk about the title and subtitle, because frequently there is some adjustment that needs to be made. We often have a ‘metaphor’ conversation: [I ask] ‘what’s the central metaphor of this book; is there a way to express the title metaphorically?’ Sometimes the writer has a metaphor but it’s a flawed one, so I have to help him or her find one that is fresher or more exact.

Then I look closely at the table of contents, the overall structure of the book. I may say, ‘Gee, did you think of dividing this book into three parts? It might be helpful.’ Or perhaps the way the ideas are expressed in the table of contents is not crystal clear. Again, we need a central metaphor to inform everything.

The last big question I often ask is, ‘What kind of a book is this? Is it going to be picked up and read from cover to cover? Or is this a workbook-type thing? How practical do you want this book to be? How literary?’ That’s going to guide how we organise it.

I take notes throughout the meeting. After that conversation, I send the manuscript to the author with the memo, using the author’s answers to help me address certain questions. So the memo, too, is a road map. It’s not a judgment about the manuscript, it’s not a criticism of everything that’s wrong, but rather the expression of this vision of the next draft.

And then usually there’s a rewrite, and sometimes I do another round of edits after that.

SG Do you only ever work on non-fiction?

CH I almost never work on fiction. I do a little bit with writers whom I’ve worked with a lot, who really trust me. I don’t consider myself a fiction editor. I just think there are people who have a lot more experience doing that. But I’ll work on memoir, I’ll work on any nonfiction. The subjects that I’ve worked on have been all over the map. I’ve done a lot of business books, leadership books, organisational behaviour, historical work. I’ve edited more than two dozen books. On a shorter magazine length, I’ve done memoir, travel and first-person essays. And journalism! I’ve been an editor at two different newspapers and three different magazines.

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SG Can editing be taught? How should it be taught?

CH I once asked Orville Schell [then dean of the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism] whether the school taught editing, and he said, ‘No, editing can’t be taught’. And I said – ‘Hunh! Why do you say that?’ He almost treated it as though it was a magical, intrinsic talent, and the only way you could learn how to edit was to be mentored, to sit at the knees of an editor.

I disagree with that. Having taught editing quite a bit myself, I think there are lots of things you can teach about editing, things that should be taught about editing. Unfortunately, most editors are not taught; it’s just a messy process of trial and error, and there are a lot of not very good editors out there as a result.

You can spend time talking with editors about how to be better listeners to writers, and about how important the writer-editor relationship is. You can have exercises – not role-play, exactly, but ways to test a person’s ability or comfort level with the very particular kind of communication that has to happen with editing. You are basically telling people all the time that they are going to have to do a shit load more work and you have to make them excited about doing it. It’s an impossible thing that you’re trying to communicate, but at the same time you are conveying excitement and enthusiasm, such that the writer feels jazzed about going back and doing a whole lot more work. It’s an iffy proposition, but there are ways to do it effectively.

So that’s one thing; the editor-writer relationship and how important it is to deliver the bad news in such a way that the writer is excited about going back and doing another draft.

On the skills level, a lot of editing skills can be taught, whether they be copy-editing skills, or phrasing skills.

What makes a difference between a really good editor and a not-so-good editor is the ability to see the potential of the piece and to articulate it for the writer who is doing his or her best but is often lost in the material. The editor can show the writer the path; the editor can understand the material in a way that the writer doesn’t, and articulate that for the writer.

Instead, so many editors just tell the writer what is wrong. But editing should not be a process of passing judgment. It’s a process of seeing what is latent in a manuscript and helping the writer make it more explicit. It is a skill that involves a lot of emotional intelligence but you can teach that. All of those things can be explained.

SG I have heard journalism school faculty say they offered editing courses in the past, but they were taught in a very narrow way – basically, how to mark up copy – and they thought it was a waste of time.

CH I think it is, too. Journalism schools in the US are very focused on reporting and writing. That is what you go to journalism school to learn to do. And there might be one editing course. I don’t know why journalism schools seem to have this prejudice against teaching editing in a more comprehensive way. Because what ends up happening is that you have a whole bunch of untrained editors. People are really good as reporters and then they promote them to editors – but reporting and editing are completely different skills. Someone can be a great reporter and a terrible editor. Although, being a good reporter helps you to be a good editor. Because you spot holes, and you know how to fill the holes if you’re in a pinch.

I teach at UC Berkeley Extension. All the editing courses that I’m aware of are at these extension schools, where you can get a certificate in editing and publishing [after taking courses in] ‘beginning copyediting’, ‘intermediate copyediting’ and ‘advanced substantive editing’ – that’s what I taught. There’s also a preparatory grammar course, for people who aren’t ready for the introduction-level course. [Altogether it is] a three-semester programme and you come out of it ready for an entry-level editing job. You have practical [editing] skills. You just don’t necessarily have the journalistic skills.

So that’s the problem. The journalism schools teach reporting and journalism, and they don’t teach editing. And then there are these other schools that teach editing, and don’t teach any of the other skills, and there are an awful lot of editors who have never been journalists.

SG Does new media publishing make editing more important?

CH I have a website, and the trouble with websites is that you write a blog, and you add from the top. The weird thing about the blog as a form is that the reader views it upside down. The reader meets the most recent post first. So how do you reverse-engineer that? On websites, someone like me needs an editor because I can’t see how to make it make sense.

Even though I’m more of a book editor than a magazine editor, the magazine is my metaphor. And so I look at my home page as a magazine table of contents. I want to have a lot of rich content but I do want a structure. I’m at a point where I want to hire an editor to come in.

Webmasters use the archive metaphor, but after a while it starts to feel like a messy repository. I’m not really talking about navigation, I’m talking about synthesising the ideas in the right order. You need someone with an editorial mind to come in and look at the whole thing and work out a way of organising the material so that the reader can comprehend it.

SG Perhaps one can treat blogs like serial narratives?

CH With people like Dickens, Henry James, you had a readership that [saw] the magazine every month, reading things in order. Now, people are getting things much more randomly and not necessarily reading things in order. That subverts the whole idea of narrative. It’s so different from a book where I know how a reader is going to hit the manuscript. The idea of a table of contents, a cumulative approach to information, is really important.

On the web, you have no way of knowing whether people are going to get the information in the order that it’s delivered. That subverts literary nonfiction, where you’re trying to use narrative devices and [other] innovative [things]. Structure is an essential part of storytelling, of rhetoric, of argument. But structure is by definition subverted on the web.

On the other hand, the book I just published is not a narrative book. I consciously carved up the text in a lot of different ways. I created a lot of resting points. You can pick up the book at any point and there will be something on almost every page that you can read. Because I know that the subject matter makes people feel anxious. I don’t want people to feel that it’s a book they have to sit down and read cover to cover. It makes the material more accessible, more approachable.

Depending on the subject, you’re either trying to construct a really artful narrative, or you’re trying to deconstruct something and make it approachable, by giving people bite-sized chunks that they can digest in all sorts of random ways.

SG You have said, ‘the magazine is my metaphor’. Could you expand?

CH Firstly, I’m a very visual person, so I love magazines because of the visuals. The colour, the layout of the page, the table of contents that leads you to articles you can read, one at a time. I like the artfulness of the layout; it’s more interesting to me than a book. Even in books, I spend a lot of time on page design. I’m fortunate that my publishers have given me really good designers. I think typography is even more important to me than photos or graphics per se. I love what you can do with type and colour. And a magazine article or short story is my favourite length. The newspaper’s not my metaphor. Some people really think ‘above the fold’ but I think like a magazine reader or editor.

SG From an editing point of view, what is the difference between magazine, books and newspapers?

CH The newspaper grants the least individual voice to the writer, but that is because the prerogative is to get information to the reader as efficiently as possible. There isn’t time to spend on the craft, because of the urgency of the deadline. Magazines are in-between. They give a little more focus on voice and little more range to the writer. [But] the readership is defined by the publisher.

With books, the writer gets the most leeway. It’s really the writer’s book, sink or swim. There’s relatively little editing in books today. I know these stories about Maxwell Perkins[i] and others, but my experience is that editors touch the manuscript little or not at all. So it’s in books that the writer has the most leeway to do the work the writer wants to do. I don’t think people buy a book because of the publisher. There is a taste factor, but it’s really much more about the writer.

On the web, there are some brands like Salon [that are based] on the magazine model, but other than that it’s pretty writer-driven. And then you have all the excesses and indulgences [of that], all the flaws of non-edited copy.

Although I say the magazine is my metaphor, I don’t actually like writing for magazines. I’ve worked for a lot of different magazines, and I have felt manhandled the most at magazines. I often felt I couldn’t figure out what [they] wanted. Sometimes they say they’re going for something and then they contradict themselves. I find the worst editing in magazines, in general. It’s the way they are structured. There will be this brilliant person at the top who is setting the course of the magazine, and everyone else is trying to figure out what that person wants [and] and the junior editors are often not very good. Some magazines do this kind of gang-edit. That’s my personal experience.

The kind of editing that I believe in is incredibly intense, incredibly special, a true creative collaboration. I think that is what every writer dreams of: an editor who understands you, like a intellectual soulmate, who has powers that you don’t have and brings them to bear, so that the manuscript gets better. And that editor is a champion for you with other editors. That is what most writers want. That’s what I want to be, as an editor. And I only want to work with other editors who grant me autonomy to deliver. There’s a contract; they trust me to work with the writer, I get the writer to trust me; the writer and I collaborate, and then together we deliver something to the publisher.

Unfortunately, on many magazines, that is not how it works. There’s an assigning editor; but once the manuscript comes in there is an editorial meeting where six editors sit around and talk about an article [and] the editor-in-chief has the ability to weigh in. There’s very little autonomy and trust given to the individual editor. The best work comes out of that relationship between editor and writer. But I think magazines often subvert it. In newspapers, editors are generally given more autonomy. There may be a top editor but they’re not rewriting leads, asking lower-level editors to change the whole thing. On magazines, there’s a lot of messing with your head that goes on.

I wrote a piece for Smithsonian magazine, 400 words; I had to rewrite it four times. You can’t go that wrong in 400 words. You can’t improve it that much in 400 words. That’s just bad editing. It’s not trusting the reporter to get the best story. One of those rewrites happened because the time hook changed. Such editing is inexcusable, to me.

I want to give you my definition of good editing. I used to own a restaurant with the chef, and our definition of a good waiter was: ‘Your glass is always full; the waiter is never there.’ This kind of elegant attention… your needs are met, you’re always happy, you don’t ever need to ask for the waiter, and the waiter doesn’t put himself in your face, That’s analogous to my definition of a good editor. Somehow the writer feels his or her piece came out exactly right, it is what he or she intended to write, and the editor’s fingerprints aren’t there. The writer feels that the piece is entirely true, and there’s no evidence of the editor. The editor may have been there quite actively, but doesn’t manhandle the copy or leave traces. It takes an incredibly good ear, and that’s what you can’t teach about editing.

One of my editors, at W. W. Norton, didn’t touch the manuscript – she’s not a line editor – but she engaged with it and we had long discussions. She gave me tough love, and I went back and rewrote it. And then she fought like hell for a good cover design, page design, and a very careful copy edit.

SG When you work for a publisher, what are the circumstances in which the in-house editors hire you?

CH I have an unusual deal with Harvard Business Press. They hire me when they want to publish a book but feel the author doesn’t know how to write for a wider audience. Or just needs more help than an in-house editor can give. They know I will deliver a book that they can publish. They take the money out of the author’s advance to pay me. That’s unusual, but a lot of their authors are professors or highly paid consultants who can afford it.

Otherwise, I am not hired by editors; I’m hired by writers. That’s increasingly what’s happening. Writers hire editors out of their own pockets. The cost has shifted onto the writer. If you don’t pay, you end up getting a book between covers that hasn’t been edited. I paid a line-editor for both of my books. The line editor working for me most recently ended up doing a little more developmental editing than she intended, helping me identify things to cut. Line editors normally just look at sentences, not for punctuation and spelling but for content, phrasing and music.

I try to define these different types of editing—line editing, copy-editing, developmental editing. I like to give writers a vocabulary so that they can articulate to me what it is that they want. They might say ‘editing’ when they just want someone to proofread. Or they might think they need just line editing, when they need an overhaul.

Then there’s ghostwriting. Some people call themselves editors and they’re really ghostwriters. I have to have a conversation about that with a lot of my authors. I say, ‘I don’t ghost, I edit. If you want a ghostwriter, go ahead but it’s not me. Because, when I write something, my name gets on it.’ That’s just my personal policy. For some people it’s part of a continuum, but I don’t consider that editing.

SG Is that because it’s a euphemism?

CH There are a lot of writers who are academics, business professors, who have a lot of pride; they don’t want to say they hired a ghost writer. They want to say that they wrote their book. They don’t mind saying they had an editor—of course they had an editor! Plus, they’re used to delegating to graduate students, they’re used to having other people do stuff, so they are OK with hiring an editor. But they don’t want to say they haven’t written their book, so they don’t want a ‘ghostwriter’. But they might secretly or openly want the ‘editor’ to ghostwrite.

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SG Do you identify yourself as ‘editor’? If not, what do you call what you do?

CH I think of myself primarily as a writer. My business card says ‘Constance Hale. Scribe’. I use that word because there’s some level at which I’m not comfortable calling myself ‘writer’.

Usually, if I’m writing a short bio, I call myself a journalist, just because that’s the most all-inclusive label for what I do … I think it’s important that my training is as a journalist. Both to me as an editor, and as a writer. I’m trained in journalism. That’s a pretty important thing for me to signal to people. That you’re getting that set of skills in my work. It really distinguishes me from many editors. The majority of editors do not have a journalistic background. That background gives me an ability to question facts, and I am trained in finding stuff out fast. It’s easy for me to interview people. Sometimes I can step in, as an editor, in a way that maybe other editors cannot. I have high standards for fact-checking. And I have a journalist’s sense of story. [As a job title] ‘journalist’ encodes a lot of things that I think are very important, and [which] I think many editors don’t offer.

SG What metaphors do you use? You mentioned ‘waiter and glass’.

CH The other common metaphor I use is ‘collaborator’. To me the ideal relationship between a writer and editor is one of intense collaboration, where the editor is OK with the writer getting the credit. It’s the editor’s job to step out of the way. To coax things out of the writer and sometimes to articulate what the writer is not able to articulate. It’s the writer’s story. So there’s a selflessness about editing that’s important. I guess ‘midwife’ is another good metaphor. You’re helping the delivery but it’s really not your baby. I am working with one writer who was born in India and we say that I am her ‘didi’—her older sister or cousin.

The magazine editor has two functions: One is curation. The editor-in-chief is a curator. What makes Adam Moss a brilliant editor is his powers as curator. The individual story editor is quite different. Some people are real geniuses as editors-in-chief, but not great at a one-on-one level with writers. I never wanted to be editor-in-chief, because what I really love is working with a writer on a story. The most inspiring editor I’ve ever worked with might be Kevin Kelly at Wired; he had a way of seeing possibilities in a story that the writer might have been blind to. I long to work with editors at The New Yorker, because of the gentle way the are said to work with writers.

SG When you are editing, how do you know when you have finished?

CH You run out of time. I work within contracts. Often, you use up the budget, run out of time, run out of money.

SG Can you give any examples of conflict over editing, or pushback?

CH I have had clashes with writers where I don’t get what I want. I make my case but ultimately it’s not my book.

I can give you an example. The author had worked at a high level in the federal government. It was a really smart book, but when he had had bad experiences, he refused to name names. When he had good experiences he did name names. I said, ‘It feels disingenuous, it makes the book seem less true. There are a lot of reasons why we journalists don’t like anonymous sources.’ I pushed him and I pushed him, but he just didn’t want to be negative, he didn’t want to play that game. In some cases I was able to get him to identify some people more clearly (senior White House official, for example). But I lost that argument. And indeed, when the book came out, more than one reviewer said the book would have been stronger and more credible if it had named people. It was a flaw in the book, but it was his book.

Apart from that, I can think of very few times when I have had a clash. Not that I don’t push—hard. When there’s something that bothers me about a piece, I try to talk to the writer about the craft in such a way that I persuade the writer to come my way. But I think that’s because I approach it as a craft. I mark up hard copy a lot and I always say to the writer, these are all just suggestions. If you find another way to deal with this sentence, change it in a different way. Most good writers will see if something’s better and they want it to be better. I don’t say, ‘this is a bad sentence’. I usually point them in a direction. I have no ego about them not taking my edit.

One [area of conflict] is jargon. I try to rid the text of jargon. Whether it’s a doctor or lawyer or, especially, a business professor or CEO, I get a lot of pushback. They defend it. And it’s hard because a lot of times, the ideas are encoded in the jargon. They say, ‘This is how we talk’. I have to invest a lot of energy in talking to my writers about language because, again, I’m working with them to understand the notion of audience. Who are talking to – your peers or a lay audience? A lot of times people say they’re talking to a lay audience but then they use language that is for their peers. I say: ‘You have a different reader now.’ Sometimes we have jokes about it. One writer drove me crazy me with the phrase ‘cross-domain synergies’. We ended up with ‘four-way wins’. To me, all these conversations about language and metaphor are very creative.

SG Do you experience people misunderstanding the role of editing?

CH The biggest misunderstanding is that oftentimes, people say they want to hire me as an editor, but what they really want is a proofreader. To me that is an interesting misconception about the publishing process. The more naïve people are about publishing, the more they think that editing is just fixing mechanical mistakes. They don’t realise why I charge the money I do, because it’s a high-level, intense, hard project, and I have a high level of skill.

To give you an illustration of this: at Prose Doctors, we put up an essay about the cost of editing because most people who come to us have absolutely no idea how expensive high-level editing is. We’re cheaper than a therapist, cheaper than a doctor, cheaper than a lawyer. But people have a low regard – they’ll pay a massage therapist an hourly rate, but they don’t see editing as worth that kind of money.

SG Is that because it is invisible?

CH I think that goes to a larger question. I study about language and writing and have become aware of the extent to which people feel they own language. We don’t think of language as an art or a separate skill, we think of it as something that is part of our humanity. We all think we ought to be able to write naturally. People don’t take a lot of time to rewrite. Even though there is a tremendous amount of anxiety out there about grammar, people don’t think they should pay for editing. And this is more true now than ever. We want free content, and that means there isn’t money for editing. In the background, there’s this sense of writing not having the same value as painting, or other arts.

The good side of this is that I consider my books works of evangelism. I’m an evangelist for good writing and craft. And what I try to do in my books is to show how the ‘natural’ expression is inferior. And that it takes a tremendous amount of work, discipline, talent and experience to take the natural and craft it into something beautiful, into something deeper, more meaningful, more impressive, in the sense of making an impression on the reader.

So my books are largely about trying to tap into this natural affinity for language that we all have, this desire to communicate, and give people a path to becoming more skilled at it. And incidentally, making them more appreciative of the people who do take the time and do all that work.

I was giving a reading recently in San Francisco and a colleague of mine, a writer, said: ‘What’s the word for what you do? Do we have a word for it?’ Just as we teach ‘art appreciation’, should we teach ‘language appreciation’? We look at art and music this way, we study them to understand how they [work], but studying literature is not the same. We don’t study the actual craft. I think about the literary critic James Wood, who calls this kind of study of literature “close reading”. To me, that’s the missing link—we ought to be learning how very skilled great writers are.

We can all draw, but none of us equate ourselves with Rembrandt. And so we can all speak and tell stories, but… somehow we don’t have the same sense of how difficult it is to be Hemingway, to get from A to Z when it comes to language. So that is a sub-text of my books. We all do these things, but only literary artists or craftsmen puts themselves through all this. It is a practice.

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Excerpted from Editors Talk about Editing, by Susan Greenberg (2015, Peter Lang Inc.). The interview was conducted on October 19, 2012, in Brooklyn, New York. Other editors featured in the book’s 12 chapters include John McIntyre (Baltimore Sun), Adam Moss (New York), Evan Ratliff (The Atavist), and Ileene Smith (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).