Communication is Key
The importance of talking, understanding, and being on the same page in creative projects.
Photographers, writers and editors all have vastly different roles in the world of creativity, and sharing your work with others is a vulnerable experience for everyone. Breaking down those walls and letting someone see the raw, work-in-progress that you’re labouring over is difficult, but it’s also extremely rewarding. An outside eye can see things that you’ve missed, and ask questions you would never have considered on your own. This feedback is priceless, but it has to be done well. That’s where communication is essential.
When initially contacting the photographer my partner and I were paired with for our photobook collaboration assignment, we found that they seemed quite confident in their abilities to edit the written components of the photobook, and were reluctant to have us too heavily involved in the process. It was subtle, but we got the feeling that they didn’t quite understand our role in crafting the photobook.
In hindsight, our initial email may have been a bit vague. We assumed they had encountered editors before, and that they understood the help we could offer them. We didn’t go into detail about the certain editing processes we could provide because we didn’t want to overwhelm them on the off-chance they were behind schedule. (They hadn’t contacted us, so we had to make the first move, and we thought they might be stressed.) As a result, they were confused about our intended involvement, which would explain their comment about editing their own photobook; when they sent us the draft, they said they were happy to do their own edits if we ran out of time or didn’t get a chance to go through the whole book. (In the end, they were cutting it a little fine, so we were actually not too far off with that earlier assumption.) My partner and I split the work in half and provided comments about the draft, including formatting suggestions, minor grammatical edits, and queries regarding the tense of the writing.
Oftentimes our work feels quite private and personal, and sharing this with others can be a very vulnerable process.
If we’d been more clear from the beginning that we were offering this line-by-line copyediting, these formatting suggestions, and overall proofreading, they probably would have been more comfortable involving us in the project from the get-go.
In saying this, I’m sure their reluctance to relinquish control is still something every creative has experienced at some point, whether they fully understood their partner’s intentions or not. Oftentimes our work feels quite private and personal, and sharing this with others can be a very vulnerable process. Our photographer obviously didn’t have much experience being edited before, as a photography student and not a writer, so that’s another reason their hesitation was understandable.
As a writing and editing student, I’ve had many workshopping sessions where I’ve shared my work and spent time critiquing the work of my peers, so collaborating with a photography student who wasn’t as familiar with this process was a reminder of the importance of clear communication. It’s vital that we try to eliminate any preconceptions and expectations about the people we work with, and their understanding of what we do.
Our photographer was documenting an important person in their life, which may have felt quite personal to share with their class, let alone two people they hadn’t met before from a different field of study. As outsiders in the photography world and their class, my partner and I wanted to be as approachable and friendly as possible.
Another interesting takeaway from this project came from reading the first draft. As I previously mentioned, I’ve spent time in my course editing the work of my fellow writers, but I lack experience in editing the work of creatives in other fields. I think my time spent working with my peers gave me a certain expectation of how much editing would be necessary; I was surprised to see the amount of simple proofreading errors in the first draft of the photobook because most of the work I’d edited in the past had been written by someone with some level of editing experience.
I assumed our photographer would do a quick proofread of their work after writing each caption, similar to the way I write, but there were minor spelling mistakes and simple grammatical errors in the file we received that had obviously not been proofread. Of course, that’s my job, but my understanding of my own writing process had given me a preconception I was not aware of. In the future, I won’t expect any level of editing to be done, as most people don’t write and proofread as they go, the way I do.
I always find it interesting learning about other people’s creative processes, and I’ve had many discussions with my peers about the degree of editing we do while writing. I’ve always found it hard to turn off the editing tendencies of my brain, and I often spend far too much time rereading and rewriting sections of my work.
Every experience I have in this industry makes me a better editor, and this was no exception.
This project felt like a taste of real-world work as an editor, collaborating with someone from a different creative field and helping them achieve the best project they possibly could. Our photographer was new to the editing world and felt out of their depth sharing their work with strangers. Similarly, my partner and I were nervous at the idea of reaching out to someone we’d never met and offering assistance with our new skills and knowledge learned throughout out Professional Writing and Editing course.
In the end, our collaboration on the photobook was a rewarding and educational experience, and I’m thrilled to know that we helped create the best version of our photographer’s photobook. Every experience I have in this industry makes me a better editor, and this was no exception.
Moving forward, I will always remember the importance of communication in editing. Collaboration is about listening and understanding. It’s about recognising the courage it takes to share your work with others and open yourself up to criticism. Whether it’s a photobook, an instruction manual, or an epic fantasy fiction novel, the editor and author must always be on the same page.
