Wearing someone else’s pants — my first experience as an editor
Being an editor is a lot like wearing someone else’s pants. They don’t fit you, you can’t walk in them very well and you want nothing more than to tear them off and run around in your knickers. However, you can’t take these pants off, and you can’t adjust them to fit you. There is only one option, you must adjust yourself to fit the pants.
When you create something original, be it a story, a novel or in this case a photobook, you put a part of yourself into it, it becomes personal. So, when someone comes along and tells you half of what you’ve made is useless, this can be quite upsetting, regardless of whether it’s true or not. As an editor, your job is to help develop the project into the best it possibly can be, without turning it into your own work. You have to keep the author happy, but you also need to do your job. You need to find a balance between the two and the best way to do that is to wear the author’s pants.
Not literally. I would like to be very clear on this point, please do not under any circumstances steal a stranger’s pants and put them on. That’s just weird. What I do mean is that you need to see things from their perspective, you need to understand what they are trying to create, and care about it as much as they do, without actually making it your own.
The first lesson I learned is that communication is key, when it comes to achieving this balance. When I met with Matthew for the first time, and he told me he had dyslexia I thought nothing of it. I expected a few spelling mistakes that were beyond his control, and that is something that I can very easily fix in a mark-up. What I didn’t consider was that Matthew would have trouble reading my feedback. This made communicating via text or email quite hit and miss, I’d correct something, and he’d misinterpret my corrections, or overlook something I’d flagged. We decided that the best way around this was to ditch the traditional mark-up and meet in person to work through the captions together.
Matthew’s first draft already had a couple of captions, but he requested that I write some for him, and re-write the ones he’d written. I happily obliged, and it was in doing this that I realised how delicate the role of editor really is. I could write the captions in my own voice, but then it would no longer be Matthew’s photobook. In order to do this, I had to think like Matthew, I had to understand his project as he understood it.
Over the next few weeks I grew more and more passionate about the photobook. I watched the story unfold and did my best to nudge it in the right direction, but I never wanted to control it, and I never thought of it as mine. We developed a system, Matthew would send me a draft, I would add in some captions and fix up any errors. Then we’d meet up, and I’d read the captions out loud to him and explain what I had done and why. Then I’d send the document to him and he’d copy and paste the changes into his own document. Then I’d get a new draft. It worked better than I thought and sitting with Matthew made it easier to discuss ideas that we had.
The problem was that Matthew had started the project a lot later than other people in the class, so by the time we started really working together, we had only three weeks to finish it. The photobook slowly consumed my life, other assignments suffered because all my attention was focused on getting this finished on time. I’d wake up in the morning to a message from Matthew asking for help and go to bed at night thinking about what I had to do next.
Sending the book off for printing was the best feeling, I was relieved that it was finished, and proud of what Matthew has achieved, yet at the same time I was sad to let it go. I’d really enjoyed editing, it brought with it a special kind of satisfaction, knowing that not only did you do a good job, but that you helped someone else in doing so. I was proud, but not so much of my own input, but of Matthew’s work, and the way the photobook turned out in general. I completely surprised myself by enjoying this as much as I did, I expected that I would turn into a boring old grammar Nazi and have photographers running from me in terror. None of that happened, instead I really felt like I was helping Matthew and that was, for me, the most important part of being an editor.
