Thursday, March 13, 2014

Beyond cuts: the many roles of a writer's editor - Eleanor Catton & Max Porter discuss deletion and deadlines

Novelist Eleanor Catton and her editor Max Porter's alliance shows how much more than wielding a blade goes into this relationship

Wednesday 12 March 2014   

Scissors
More to editing than you can see at first … a half-concealed pair of scissors. Photograph: Alamy

Henry James called editing "the butchers' trade". But he also said, "I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort," so you can see how the old anglophile and his editors may have crossed horns.

However, if we're honest, wouldn't we, the reader, prefer to chew over a well-honed slice of literature than wade through fatty hunks of unedited, flabby prose? Isn't the editor's first loyalty to the reader, and not the author? Isn't it better to wield the knife than to club out something that the cow might approve of?



This weekend, as part of the New Zealand festival, The Luminaries author and winner of the Man Booker prizeEleanor Catton, discussed deletion, deadlines and several other facets of the writer-editor relationship with her British editor Max Porter. If this sounds a little like sitting down with your ex-husband to publicly discuss why he always disliked your sense of humour, then think again; the modern editor is, according to Porter, "part proofreader, part therapist, part in-house champion and, increasingly, there to put a marketisation on the written word." This was less meat cleavers at dawn, more gentle emails about getting off Twitter.

With 391,000 books being self-published in the US in 2012 alone, the old 20th-century model of the creative editor is, according to Porter, "an endangered species". While Porter described his role as "like making a pot" alongside a writer "using gentle tweaks and nudges", it is nevertheless a "highly irritable occupation". And a thankless one, judging from Catton's anecdote about sitting next to Germaine Greer at an awards ceremony as Greer leant over and whispered very loudly that, "there's no such thing" as a good editor.

At its foundation the role of the editor is a blend of meddler and midwife. You're expected to not just pinch, pluck and pull a novel into shape, but, in many cases, make sure the thing is being written at all.
More

No comments: