On learning to let go
What I learned by editing my first full book
I’m writing through the haze of cigarette smoke, wine and coffee at the no-sleep end of semester. I am tired like a single mum with two jobs, and have just realised that the baby was never mine.
I’d had a plan, dammit, for my own protection; to manage my workload, already split between an internship and full-time study at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. On the day the Photography and Photo Imaging students came into class, I shrank in my chair. Small target. Everyone else in our Professional Writing and Editing class would end up with two projects. (Ha! Not me.) I was determined to be assigned only one. I thought I chose wisely which photo-book to edit — I knew a lot already about Danielle Borle’s topic, Australian farming, having grown up on the land.
My plan worked, and I was assigned to edit only one book, but nothing could protect me from myself. Hoo boy.
Editing teachers often explain how to work with the difficult clients, those who don’t want to be edited, who must be cajoled, convinced and carried along on the sustenance of a good-bad-good-news sandwich. But I have no interest in working at a sandwich shop. I want to write and edit, and get paid to do so. And I was determined to show I could. Besides, Danielle welcomed my every change. She was grateful for my work. We worked well together. What I learned however from editing Dani’s book, Working the Boards, was that an editor must keep in sight how much work a given project actually requires of them.
There are more than 4,000 words in Working the Boards. For a photo-book, where every word counts, that’s a lot. I rewrote each sentence. I worked hard through nights to meet deadlines, but the truth is I didn’t need to. For a non-writer, Danielle wrote a lot — thousands more words even, that didn’t made it to print. I saw them as good but not great, and wanted everything to be perfect. I thought it would be easier to rewrite what she’d sent. I cut repetition, improved sentence structure and introduced fancy new grammar. I hope and trust that I stayed true to Dani’s voice.
Editing teachers also talk a lot about the brief — and the truth is that my teacher, Liz Steele, warned me I was doing more than required. But it was too late. While I think the book is better for my rewriting, the many hours of meeting with Dani, thinking, and communicating, all this tired me out and diminished my capacity to do other assignments to the same standard. In the end, I became very involved. I wanted the book to be the best that it could. I cared about the content and came to respect Dani greatly. My emotional responses, pedantry and ego led me to do more work than was necessary. The value of this assignment is that it mirrors real life — paid, professional work in which you negotiate a brief and what can be achieved within the given time and budget. After these preliminary discussions, you meet the brief you’ve agreed on. That way, editors are able to manage competing demands on their time.
In retrospect, I don’t think I even established a brief for myself. I know I didn’t communicate one to Dani, and so I came to understand how crucial communication really is. We spoke constantly — calling, texting, emailing — and met every few days to bring our contributions together in the one InDesign file. At times, I’m sure I hounded Dani. I’m glad I did, because we were making changes and catching errors right up until the book went to print. When editing a project like Working the Boards, communication is fluid, dynamic, rapid and essential to delivering a high-quality publication to deadline. In the context of this assignment, I could have asserted the brief — and saved myself work — at many points after initial contact, but we became more rather than less ambitious. (Even adding a blurb, for the first time in this collaborative assignment’s history, I think, at the eleventh hour.)
The reality is I came to see Working the Boards as being somehow my book too. But it is not. The book and the story are Danielle’s. She was behind the lens for months, capturing images and imagining a narrative. I came in for just a few weeks. I was only a pixel somewhere in the background, an assistant narrative curator, and remain now as a simple acknowledgement. That is as it should be. This shouldn’t have become my baby and, with mild separation anxiety, that is a lesson hard learned. Still, I’m glad of the time that I spent with the kid, and hope I had a good influence.
Danielle and I sequenced the photos together. She talked to me about how the images were captured and explained what she’d intended to show by them. She taught me about InDesign. I spoke to her about narrative arcs, the ways characterisation facilitates readers’ emotional connections, the importance of style sheets and the em dash. We discussed the story continuously — what aspects were best told through images, and where text could better enrich meaning. We used aerial photographs to break up sections, worked out the finer detail of how to explain about shearing, fly-strike and dags, and learned a lot about each other as well. Many aspects of our exchange, I suspect, went well beyond what would be typical of a professional editing relationship.
Next time, I’ll do things differently. I’ll establish a firm brief and production schedule, and keep to them, so that communication and workload are more structured, less taxing. I’ll recognise that the project belongs to someone else, and my role is limited. I am glad, though, that in this case I didn’t. Even sitting in the library after a thirteen-hour day, writing this reflection, I can see the immense value of my learning experience. And tomorrow, I will get to see the book itself.
