Is editing a lost art?

Most writers hate — sometimes with good reason. They consider the editor a cynical and pessimistic nag, always finding fault.

And if they were honest, most writers loathe even more the editor’s red pen. To them, the perfectionist editor hovers maliciously with a red pen in his hand looking menacingly and sometimes indignantly for what to slash from the narrative, characters, setting and plot — and the editor seemingly does it all with a wicked composure and a “kind of manic glee.”

Many writers think that editors are sadists who thrive on others’ misfortunes and still many people do know what editors do. They are the unsung, faceless and nameless workers wallowing in anonymity until a book comes off the press with mistakes.

Then suddenly the angry question is, “Who is the editor of this book?” If the book comes out right, the compliment is “the author did a good job!” In that case, the editor is not even mentioned or acknowledged. This happens to all in-house editors in publishing houses and most editors in newspaper companies.

The writer can take comfort in the solace that there is nothing malicious about an editor. In fact, it may surprise the writer who has received a rejection letter sounding as final as death that the editor is a hunter-gatherer who is always looking for a good manuscript to publish.

The editorial process should not be feared though it can leave the writer as shaken and as frankly bewildered as does an earthquake, a hurricane or even a terrible nightmare. It may be rigorous and unpleasant to the author but it is a necessary “evil” he cannot do without.

It has been rightly said that, “Editing is the difference between a garden choked with weeds and beautiful tomatoes by the end of summer.”

A recent review in this newspaper on the book, The Unity of African Ancient History by acclaimed Tanzanian archaeologist Felix Chami decried its poor editing (The EastAfrican, September 1-7, 2008).

The review praised Dr Chami for the excellent content research he did but blasted its mediocre editorial intervention. The book must have turned out like a garden chocked with weeds.

The anguished reviewer wrote, “Chami’s exhaustive work, though a gem, is unfortunately unpolished. A crack editor should have been called in to keep the texture and contours of this complex, invaluable narrative in harmony, on track and lucid.

The author’s anarchistic English, his meandering sentences and tedious repetition of ideas and phrases, the result perhaps of returning again and again to the manuscript after long lapses in time, leave the reader gasping for air.”

That is what happens when there is lack of good editors — who are not easy to come by in East Africa. This problem has been compounded by several factors. Firstly, not many people are trained in editing. Only a few institutions offer specific training in editing — the others offer something vaguely akin to it.

THEN SECONDLY, AND MOST importantly, editing is an art most editors do not even understand or may not have the skills to properly execute.

Two of the lost arts in editing are developmental and line editing. After the editor has searched for a manuscript and found one, it should be subjected to developmental editing.

At this stage, the editor looks at the manuscript as a whole and edits it structurally and substantially for content, organisation, tone, level of detail and clarity. This is the stage of editing in which the editor can re-arrange chapters and eliminate annoying repetitions of sentences, phrases and even whole paragraphs.

The other stage is line or stylistic editing. This is the editing that gives the manuscript a certain linguistic thrust and poetic touch, making words “to jump off the page” in exquisite beauty. It is at this stage that the editor sometimes behaves like a creative writer.

Line editors have been described by Audrey Owen as people “in love with words, who delight in the perfect phrase, and have large vocabularies. They have a good sense of rhythm so they can choose whether to make your words flow like a lazy river or pound like a hammer, depending on your message.

They read widely for the pure joy of it. They understand the creative use of punctuation. They love dictionaries and thesauri (And they even know that thesauri is the plural of thesaurus)… Every word, every punctuation mark, gets close attention… This is the artistic part of editing.”

Unfortunately, most editors in East Africa do not read anything else apart from the manuscripts they edit and so cannot find the perfect phrase or vocabulary to give the author’s words an editor’s touch — the golden glean that makes words and sentences to shine with an alluring literary sheen.

If the editor, who trades in words, is poor at them — then the consequence is a book with blunt sentences sure to send the reader snoring if not “gasping for breath” as the aforementioned reviewer lamented.

The lack of meticulous developmental and line editing has contributed to the publication of mediocre books. They may even have good content but poor editing makes them dead and incensed reviewers dig their graves and bury them in a litany of mournful and often angry reviews.

IN HIS BOOK, EDITORS ON editing, Gerald Gross writes, “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that developmental and line editing are lost arts, but they seem to be arts less practised than before. And that perhaps is why critics and reviewers, more and more often, make a point of remarking on the absence of editing, or inferior editing, in a book they are reviewing.”

It is high time the quality of the editorial process was enhanced and everyone would profit from it, from writers to editors and publishers.

The writer is the publishing manager of Macmillan Kenya Publishers. johnmwazemba@yahoo.co.uk