Editing a photobook: Flexible editing makes creative work
It took working with photography for me to redefine editing as an art.
Before the photobook collaboration my editing experience was limited to my previous assignments. These involved a lot of diligence, a lot of following rules, checking the correct dictionary, the specified style sheet and checking, and rechecking the Style manual. As, in a scientific field, everything had an answer or a solution; I just had to find it. Name a punctuation or stylistic issue and there would, somewhere, be a precedent. Instances where judgement calls were needed had been few and far between.
Even structural editing seemed to require few actual choices; any opinions I had were routinely sandwiched between a mitigating I think maybe… (before a suggested change) and a … but up to you. All good if not (subsequent to it). While there was plenty of examples throughout class about situations where editing would not be so black and white, the day where I would have to deliberately stray from best practice seemed far away.
Enter, ‘the photobook collaboration’ — an opportunity to edit a live manuscript of a photography student. This was a new world where imagery was key, above all else; captions took on only a supporting and supplementary role. The impetus was on the photography to craft a narrative and elicit emotion.
Perhaps it should have been no surprise that the photographer cared not just about what the words said, but also how they appeared on the page, in a visual sense. While she focused on the demanding task of layout; us editors were left with editorial decisions to make.
As someone who struggles to make decisions in general — at this stage having changed the topic of this article about seven times — being in the position where my choices would affect someone else’s work seemed of truly high stakes.
Context was key. This was no academic paper, or article; the captions for text ultimately resembled poetry more closely than prose.
This was a case for throwing the style manual out the window.
Of all the documents I had come to rely on, only the humble dictionary remained relevant enough to be of any use. The introduction crafted by Jarrett was an excellent basis for how the text ultimately looked — capitalisation was rare and punctuation was sparse. This allowed for captions to evoke the informality of text messages, which called back to the title get home safe. Furthermore, the limited punctuation allowed the captions to read in a way reminiscent to a thought or an inner monologue.
Yet as an editor there were still specifics to decide on. Answering the question of the basics of what the text would look like stylistically lead, inevitably, to a plethora of more questions: Were we avoiding full-stops altogether? How about commas? If we weren’t using capitals to begin sentences, then were we disregarding conventions about the capitalisation of proper nouns too? What about sentence fragments?
Ultimately these questions were choices, decisions which we were yet to make. It was no longer a question of right or wrong, but why or why not.
Ultimately consistency was key; the finished photobook, get home safe may not follow any pre-existing document on style, instead it follows the decisions we outlined. These decisions prioritised meaning and essence over formality and encouraged visual continuity. In places where this precedent was broken, it was broken for a reason — for example there were times in which lines were punctuated more typically, with the aim of providing emphasis to a point.
Going into this collaboration photography was a mystery to me; while my appreciation for it has certainly deepened, for the most part it still is. What surprised me was that it took working with photography — which I had long placed on the pedestal as being ‘real’ art — for me to realise that maybe editing is an art, too.
I had known editing as a skill—both in a technical sense as well as the emotional labour to sensitively handle the delicate back and forth between editor and writer. I had never considered editing, in and of itself, to be an art form. This is not to say that editing has any more value than I had attributed it — nor to say that something classified as art is intrinsically more valuable than that which is considered to be a trade or profession, more so that my own insular definitions were obstructing what I could accomplish.
By limiting my view of editing to making corrections — consorting to style guides and dictionaries as if adhering to a higher power — I was severely limiting the scope of what I was able to achieve as an editor.
Of course, there are times where there are strict guidelines and procedures to follow, but ultimately by redefining editing as an art I am allowing myself to engage with individual work on an individualised level. No more smothering every text with the same tired conventions.
So, at a loss of how to handle editing a creative work with no specified style guide? Go ahead and make up your own rules and, mostly, stick to them.
