Do you know the difference between God and an editor? …

Ballerina goose

… And the answer to the hoary old joke goes: ‘God doesn’t think he’s an editor’. (My jokes are getting almost as good as David’s…)

No, I’m not talking about That Review again. The Scotsman has agreed to print a correction of its false statement about our editing policy in this coming Saturday’s edition. And so the whole unpleasant episode needs to be put behind us so we can pick ourselves up again and get on with the job at hand – getting good quality, challenging literature out there.

But there is a very useful debate that springs from all this, about the idea of editing. What should editing be? What’s the proper role of an editor? When do you edit extensively, and when is it appropriate to leave well enough alone?

One of the problems we have as a publisher when we talk about editing is that we can’t give specific examples – it wouldn’t be fair to our authors. Breaks confidentiality, and isn’t in any way appropriate. (Which also makes it very hard to defend yourself publicly on these issues!) So please bear this in mind when reading what follows.

The truth is that the way a publisher edits is often driven by the kind of work they publish. Example: we were recently told by a writer whose novels are published by one of the biggest publishers in the country, that her recent novel, on submission, was declared to be ‘too grim’ by her editor. So she was asked to invent a whole new love story sub-plot to lighten it up a bit and make it more acceptable to the book’s likely audience. She didn’t want to write a love story sub-plot; it wasn’t what she wanted for her book and she felt it detracted from her vision for the book, but she was required to do so in order for the book to ‘pass’ for publication.

It may be that, if you are writing commercial or genre fiction, you have in some sense to write for the market and you should expect no less from an editor of such books, and you should expect to have to comply. I’d be very interested to know whether other writers out there feel that’s appropriate. It’s a purely personal belief, but I’m afraid I don’t. In fact, I believe that such approaches lead to a kind of circular reasoning about the sort of books people are then deemed to want, when the truth is they’re offered little choice and they simply take what they can get. If the novel in question had been deemed to be insubstantial and the editor had been trying to suggest ways in which the author could improve it, then that’s a different thing – and I’m all for helpful editorial suggestions. But that wasn’t what was happening in this case: the editor was clear - it was a simple effort to fit a book into a comfortable niche or category. We can’t have ‘too grim’ now, can we?

Similarly, I recently spoke to another publisher (of more commercial books) who suggested that he would have required the author of one of our novels to change its ending, as it was inappropriately unhappy and readers would be sorry and feel cheated by it. As it happens, that ending was one of the things that sold me on the novel in question. The ending was part of what the author was saying with the novel. (We do have the rather old-fashioned view that a novel should say something as well as maybe tell a story!) It was the whole point. Take the ending away and you have a completely different novel. So no, I wouldn’t do that to an author, if it went against his vision for his work. If I didn’t like the book, I just wouldn’t take it on.

And that’s what it all really comes down to. At Two Ravens Press we aren’t publishing books for a category, or a genre. We’re not about publishing books that make people feel comfortable. We state quite clearly in our publishing manifesto (see the About Us page on our website) that we want work that challenges, that is different in some way. We publish the kind of work in which the author’s voice isn’t an optional extra that we can wipe out or change to what we’d like it to be or what we think an audience might feel comfortable with – we publish what we believe are works of art (see a lovely post and associated comments about whether as a writer you’re entitled to call your work ‘art’ on Emma Darwin’s fantastic blog, This Itch of Writing) and there is a degree to which the author’s vision for that work has to be respected. Similarly, we publish work that doesn’t always fit into the confining schemes suggested by ‘How to do Writing Properly’ books. Work that doesn’t follow the usual ‘rules’ of plot or structure.

So does that mean we’d let poor language and poor structure stand, just in order to respect the author and his or her vision and voice? Absolutely not. For example, when editing one of our novels, I requested the author to remove about half a dozen pages at the end of the book. No, it didn’t in any way change the ending – in the sense of changing what happened at the end of the story, or the tone or theme of the book. It removed six pages that the author agreed were superfluous, distracting, and actually not very good. We often will ask an author to take out sections that we believe are repetitive or distracting or that in any other way might detract from the quality of the book and what the author is trying to say. But that’s a very different thing indeed from what we’re talking about in the two examples of other publishers that I’ve given above. I’ll often work with an author to rewrite sloppy sentence structures, to show them how certain constructions are inelegant or worse … and a whole bunch of other editing tricks on top of basic copy-editing. But I won’t interfere with their voice, or the voices of their characters, if I can possibly avoid it. That’s about respect, and that’s an undervalued commodity these days. And if an author can’t put together an accomplished piece of work without me coming along and showing them how, then they don’t need an editor but a tutor. And they’re not ready for publication. So yes, there’s a limit to the extent to which I will be prepared to rewrite an author’s book for them.

Then, amazingly, there are the manuscripts that need very little editing. Where copy-editing really is all that’s required. And yes, that has happened to me a couple of times in the course of editing the Two Ravens Press fiction list. Where it was just a really good book, and it’s as simple as that. To edit for the sake of it … no, I just don’t have the kind of ego that makes me need to stick my oar in like that and force my contribution whether it’s necessary or not. I respect good work.

That’s the Two Ravens Press approach to editing. We’ve published some unique voices, I believe, with some unique styles of writing, and we’ve always allowed those voices to shine through. And worked with the authors’ refusal to have the guts edited out of their work. In at least one of the cases below, that’s why the author came to us in the first place – because we weren’t going to do that. Examples? Well, it’s always hard to pick people out, but there are some obvious ones that spring to mind … Lisa Glass’ Prince Rupert’s Teardrop, where the dense, very rich language (described as ‘baroque’ in one review) was an intrinsic part of the slightly schizophrenic main character’s voice. Dexter Petley’s One True Void, where normal rules of punctuation and grammar are often superfluous because that is the narrator’s voice, and that’s how he speaks. Angela Morgan Cutler’s Auschwitz, which is both in structure and in voice unlike anything else you would have found on the Waterstone’s ‘3 for 2′ tables at the beginning of the year and which she simply (and rightly) would not have given to an editor who would have cut the heart out of it.  Alice Thompson’s crisp, deceptively simple prose in The Falconer. I love all these books for what they are – I love them precisely because of the extremity of their language. Others will dislike them for exactly the same reason. But all of them were edited – in varying degrees and in varying ways. And in every case my approach to their editing preserved the writer’s vision for the book and the purity of their voice, and I believe that’s important. I hope the authors do, too.

So. At Two Ravens Press we edit to the minimum that is required. With a light, rather than a heavy hand – which means preserving the purity of the author’s voice and vision wherever possible. Virginia Woolf originally set up the Hogarth Press with her husband because she didn’t want to submit her own work to an editor who wouldn’t understand it – because her work was challenging and innovative and she knew that not everyone would get it. As writers ourselves we absolutely understand that, and we act accordingly.

As always we’d be interested in your views on editing. Good and bad experiences – whatever. We don’t think we have all the answers at Two Ravens Press, or that our approach is the only correct approach. But we always try to do what we do with integrity.

Sharon