What is editing anyway?
Aspiring editor Joyce Protacio explores editing as an idea versus editing on paper through the lens of a photobook collaboration.
For the majority of my life, editing has been about grammar, spelling, punctuation and syntax. I came into the Professional Writing and Editing course at RMIT with this assumption, and after the intense first-year subject that had me looking at things like the subjunctive mood and direct and indirect objects, I felt even more rooted in the idea of editing as a by-the-book discipline. All I could see for the road ahead were red-pen markings, dog-eared dictionary pages, and constant Google searches for things like ‘what is structure in a novel’.
For the most part, that is a big part of the position. Initially, I was enthused by it. It meant that if I wasn’t sure about something, there was always a set of rules or a checklist somewhere for me to follow. But then it began to be overwhelming: should that have been a semicolon? And how on earth do I figure out if the manuscript is too fast-paced or slow-paced?
Truthfully, I had a bit of an existential crisis and wondered if I even wanted to be an editor anymore.
In my most recent assignment – a photobook collaboration with students from RMIT’s Diploma of Photography and Digital Imaging – the role evolved into something more for me.
Editing became about meaning.
I’m sure it was always about meaning, but somewhere along the way, it got lost among the different types of non-finite verbs and weird half-truths like ‘i before e except after c’.
After getting to know my photographer Coppy and his photobook subject – known only as Violin Man, the busker whom I’ve seen most often by the Melbourne Central Station entrance – I was excited. Inspired by the scene in Julie & Julia (2009) where Meryl Streep’s Julia Child and editor Judith Jones workshop the title Mastering the art of French cooking, I printed all 306 of Coppy’s photos and spread some out on the floor in front of him.
We shuffled them around and organised them by mood. I would pick up a photo and tell Coppy it looked great, but I wasn’t sure how it connected to the following photos. He would explain his rationale and then we’d get to work on how to translate that to the reader. I would show him a photo I liked, and he would say it’s too dark or over-exposed (whatever that means) to use.
There wasn’t a style guide or a grammar rule to turn to, and that made me a bit nervous. But it always came back to these two ideas: what do you want this photo to say? and what story do you want to tell?
It was the first time in a very long while that I actually enjoyed editing.
‘Why do you want to include these two photos in the “happy” section when Violin Man is actually getting stolen from?’ turned into ‘That’s interesting. How do you feel about having this in the middle point where it can transition into explaining his current situation, like people giving less due to COVID?’
We spoke about the narrative structure of his photobook. He wanted to highlight Violin Man the public figure, and then explore Violin Man the person. Something as abstract and intangible as structure became something I could hold in my hands and see in front of me: two photographs for our beginning and our end. Violin Man playing his violin out on the street, and Violin Man at the train station at night after a long day of busking.
In the same way I didn’t know much about over-exposure in photography, he didn’t know much about sentence structure in editing. There were a lot of times we didn’t understand each other, both in explaining our fields and in our language differences.
But there were always the photographs, and what impact we wanted them to have.
Working with a non-writer on a collaboration has its challenges. I don’t think any other creative field cares about US versus Australian spelling, and I can’t blame them – sometimes I wonder why I care about these ‘issues’ too.
You speak the same language when you work with writers. They might prefer a different approach to comma usage, but they know why they want to use ‘whatevs’ instead of ‘whatever’ for their teenage character’s vocabulary.
But for this project, the copyediting and proofreading stages were hard. I get that a picture is worth a thousand words, but shouldn’t those thousand words make sense?
I resented the inner Gordon Lish in me that wanted to cross it all out with a red pen and rewrite everything into neatly punctuated, spell-checked sentences. On the other hand, I wanted to respect that this was ultimately Coppy’s project, not mine. On the other other hand, I wanted readers to be able to enjoy the photobook to its fullest extent. I was in the privileged position of being able to pick the author’s (well, photographer’s) brain and learn every meaning and nuance behind his photographs and captions. The readers were not.
In any case, I was thankful that this project was less text-heavy than usual.
As I stare at the final PDF file Coppy sent to me at 10:11 pm, I’m incredibly grateful to have had this experience. It revealed something about editing to me that had long felt strange and elusive, especially in discussions with other editors where they expertly analysed things like narrative tension and characterisation. I’ve always felt like I couldn’t wrap my head around it.
But I can wrap my hands around a photograph, and I can see where a photograph falls flat.
I’m still trying to figure out what editing looks like for me. But in this collaboration, I saw how deeply an editor can feel for an artist’s project, whether written or visual. I saw how editing interacts with and encourages other creative forms. I saw how effort towards a common goal produced something real and something beautiful.
I think I want to be an editor.
