Editors and getting to know their writers — seeing eye to eye
I like to think of writers as the actors of a play and editors as the directors of the play; writers breathe life into a character and editors give guidance on how to do so. But say a director is challenged with a limited budget for their film and has cast an actor who has never acted before — the directing becomes a little harder.
A similar scenario occurred when as a part of an assignment for my Advanced Editing class I was tasked to edit a photobook written by a person whose first language wasn’t English and who hadn’t any prior writing experience. If I’m honest, I was stuck, I was limited to staggered email conversations with my writer/photographer and it didn’t seem that they had taken a particular liking to me. I did what most people do when things got tough and called my mum. Being a single mother of three she has enough patience to thread a million needles, she said,
‘Nalin, you have to make her feel confident and comfortable talking to you, make her your friend, she barely knows you.’
So, I scheduled our first meeting and changed the way I was going to tackle this assignment. I wasn’t going to treat this as another assignment to churn out, as easy as that would’ve been. I was focused on getting to know her and her writing style.
In the meeting we sat and talked about our experiences and backgrounds, and complained about our study loads. When I finally brought up the project, I noticed she started to blush and apologise for her bad English skills; I stopped her self-deprecating rant and shared where she went right with her first draft and her mood changed completely. I complimented the scene-setting in her photographs and her ability to hint at the emotional core of the story at such an early stage. She said thank you and then went on to ask if I had anything to recommend. I looked at my massive list of weaknesses and then said one thing
‘We need to work on making the writing on each page less about what the characters are doing and more about their lives and motivations, like you’ve done on these pages three and four.’
I think referencing sections of a written piece that work and lend themselves to the story helps the author patch up the areas that don’t work as well. This was a massive learning experience for me, because we had always learnt about phrasing our feedback lightly in editing class but I never knew that it’d be this crucial in establishing a healthy editor-writer relationship. I began to realise that my writer and I had a lot more in common — we were both sensitive writers. I didn’t want to bombard her with a spewing of negative thoughts on her piece that I’d written about her first draft, so I took that list home and turned it into a list of suggestions rather than a list of weaknesses. So, the meeting ended and I told her that we’d made good headway and were on the right track, and she seemed a lot more optimistic about her photobook and its final form.
The project moved forward and she worked diligently and considered all of my feedback. By the end of the second draft I couldn’t help but think she was being a little too compliant. The last thing I wanted was for her to lose her voice in agreeing with everything I was telling her to do simply because she thought my English was better than hers. I took a step back and stopped tweaking at the little writing we had and asked her to write more words for me. Within a week she had come up with two fresh introductions and I dissected those paragraphs and found some great passages of writing we could add to the main body of the book.
As it started to show its final form, I completed and sent through the third draft author query table. She was a little confused at this format of correspondence, with this being her first time working with an editor, so I scheduled another meeting. We worked on fixing the queries together. This helped her a lot, because becoming fluent in a second language isn’t just about instruction on a page, I think being able to read my body language and hear my tone helped make the query table a lot easier for her to understand. As we went through each query, I typed exactly what my writer was saying into the resolution column of the table to ensure it was 100% her voice. I was her scribe for the final write up and more of her tone started to show through writing; she was a natural storyteller.
As the project came to an end, I learnt that as editors we need to sometimes remove ourselves from the work that we’re editing and give our writers the opportunity to say what they really mean to say and not what they think we want them to say. Throughout this project there were more in-person meetings than I had expected, I learnt a lot about my writer, the way she thinks, learns and takes in constructive criticism.
Whilst editing this photo book I’ve learnt that editing challenges your interpersonal skills — your writer becomes a new friend and you get better at making those friends as you edit.
