Not Cut Out for the Job
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1050923/asp/opinion/story_5257876.asp
NOT CUT OUT FOR THE JOB
It is not at all unusual for an editor to tamper with a writer’s manuscript. Take some notable examples. Where would F. Scott Fitzgerald be without the scrupulous assistance of Max Perkins, or for that matter, the early Hemingway? A more recent case of highly significant editorial intervention happened with Bill Clinton’s autobiography, My Life, by Robert Gottlieb, formerly editor-in-chief of Alfred Knopf, who had turned Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 into a huge success.
What does editing mean in this day and age and why can’t we do it effectively here? In broad terms, editing means reshaping, revising and/or rewriting a manuscript, apart from fact-checking and making spellings, dates, foreign words and phrases and other nitty-gritty consistent throughout the manuscript. But this is too generalized a description of the things that need to be done before the manuscript is sent to press. If there is a rule-of-thumb formula, it is this: make it short and simple.
This is done by purging useless words and useless sentences. Thus editing today means not what you need to put in but what you can no longer take out. This isn’t easy; it requires years of experience, sensitivity to language, its nuances and its usage. Because we don’t have in-house editors to handle these delicate operations, editing here boils down to just fact-checking and making the manuscript consistent in all its details. It has often been suggested that manuscripts could be given out to outside experts but publishers are reluctant to do so because it costs time and money. Besides, past experience has not been entirely satisfactory. One reason could be that most free-lance editors have been desk editors in newspapers and magazines, work that is somewhat different from book-editing.
The big question often asked here is: if they can do it, why can’t we? There are two reasons. First, unlike in India, a good amount of academic talent in the West is still attracted to publishing simply because of its interest in books even though the job isn’t the most lucrative. But the intellectual stimulus both by way of easy accessibility to books at affordable prices and encounters with authors who make them, is fair compensation to many.
The first option for most here is the media, where opportunities and rewards are greater. Let’s face it: the new generation of the academically-qualified wants to move on, instead of getting stuck in straightening out other people’s writing; they rather strike out on their own after having learned ‘how to get published.’
But the biggest hurdle to editorial revisions come from the authors themselves. Take the memoirs of four celebrities — C.D. Deshmukh, P.V. Narasimha Rao, B.K. Nehru and Nirad C. Chaudhuri. All four could have been cut to half their size to make them twice as good. The editors tried to make minor cuts but there wasn’t a chance of their acceptance with clear instructions: ‘if there is a comma in the copy there will be a comma in the book.’ So, it was stet all the way through!
RAVI VYAS
NOT CUT OUT FOR THE JOB
It is not at all unusual for an editor to tamper with a writer’s manuscript. Take some notable examples. Where would F. Scott Fitzgerald be without the scrupulous assistance of Max Perkins, or for that matter, the early Hemingway? A more recent case of highly significant editorial intervention happened with Bill Clinton’s autobiography, My Life, by Robert Gottlieb, formerly editor-in-chief of Alfred Knopf, who had turned Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 into a huge success.
What does editing mean in this day and age and why can’t we do it effectively here? In broad terms, editing means reshaping, revising and/or rewriting a manuscript, apart from fact-checking and making spellings, dates, foreign words and phrases and other nitty-gritty consistent throughout the manuscript. But this is too generalized a description of the things that need to be done before the manuscript is sent to press. If there is a rule-of-thumb formula, it is this: make it short and simple.
This is done by purging useless words and useless sentences. Thus editing today means not what you need to put in but what you can no longer take out. This isn’t easy; it requires years of experience, sensitivity to language, its nuances and its usage. Because we don’t have in-house editors to handle these delicate operations, editing here boils down to just fact-checking and making the manuscript consistent in all its details. It has often been suggested that manuscripts could be given out to outside experts but publishers are reluctant to do so because it costs time and money. Besides, past experience has not been entirely satisfactory. One reason could be that most free-lance editors have been desk editors in newspapers and magazines, work that is somewhat different from book-editing.
The big question often asked here is: if they can do it, why can’t we? There are two reasons. First, unlike in India, a good amount of academic talent in the West is still attracted to publishing simply because of its interest in books even though the job isn’t the most lucrative. But the intellectual stimulus both by way of easy accessibility to books at affordable prices and encounters with authors who make them, is fair compensation to many.
The first option for most here is the media, where opportunities and rewards are greater. Let’s face it: the new generation of the academically-qualified wants to move on, instead of getting stuck in straightening out other people’s writing; they rather strike out on their own after having learned ‘how to get published.’
But the biggest hurdle to editorial revisions come from the authors themselves. Take the memoirs of four celebrities — C.D. Deshmukh, P.V. Narasimha Rao, B.K. Nehru and Nirad C. Chaudhuri. All four could have been cut to half their size to make them twice as good. The editors tried to make minor cuts but there wasn’t a chance of their acceptance with clear instructions: ‘if there is a comma in the copy there will be a comma in the book.’ So, it was stet all the way through!
RAVI VYAS
posted by bitandpieces at 6:21 AM
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