Editors Talk about Editing

SUSAN L. GREENBERG

Editors Talk about Editing

INSIGHTS FOR READERS,
WRITERS AND PUBLISHERS

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Greenberg, Susan L.
Editors talk about editing: insights for readers, writers and publishers /
Susan L. Greenberg.
pages cm. — (Mass communication and journalism; vol. 11)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Editors. 2. Book editors—United States—Interviews.
3. Periodical editors—United States—Interviews. 4. Newspaper editors—
United States—Interviews. 5. Publishers and publishing—United States.
I. Greenberg, Susan. II. Title.
PN149.8.G84 070.5’1—dc23 2014048954
ISBN 978-1-4331-2004-6 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4331-2003-9 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-4539-1523-3 (e-book)
ISSN 2153-2761

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available
on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.

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About the author

Susan L. Greenberg (PhD, University College London) took up teaching and research after a long career as a writer and editor. She is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Roehampton and a founding member of the International Association of Literary Journalism Studies (IALJS).

About the book

The work of ‘editing’ is by and large something that happens behind the scenes, noticed only when it is done badly, or not done at all. There is not much information about what editors do. The result is that editing is not often talked about in its own right—not even by the people who do it.

This collection of interviews attempts to fill some of the gaps. The author, a former editor herself, interviews practitioners at the top of their game—from newspapers, magazines, broadcast news, book publishing, scholarly editing, academic publishing and digital curation. The interviewees think out loud about creativity and human judgment; what they have in common and what makes them different; how editing skills and culture can be shared; why editing continues to fascinate; and why any of this might matter.

Endorsement

‘At last, someone has given editors their day in the sun. Greenberg’s skilful interviewing brings to light this largely invisible work. She tracks editing practices across digital news, magazines, books and scholarly publishing in ways that no one else has done, always with an eye toward the historical, theoretical significance of the editing function. A lively-minded and valuable book.’

—John Pauly, Professor and Chair, Journalism and Media Studies, Marquette University

‘Greenberg’s interviews succeed in giving us a privileged view of the art and business of editing, from a wide variety of perspectives. Each interview offers insights into different practices and approaches. Cumulatively—and this is the art of the interviewer, who is an experienced editor herself—they give the reader a concerted, structured and engaging understanding of this often hidden process.’

—Claire Squires, Professor of Publishing Studies, University of Stirling

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

← viii | 1 → Introduction

Editing takes place behind the scenes, and is called by many different names. There is not all that much information about what happens during editing—what it is, exactly, that people do. Many people are unaware of the full range of possible editorial interventions, and therefore remain unaware of the difference editing can make, for good or ill. Like other work that happens behind the scenes, editing is often noticed only when it is done badly, or not done at all.

When one does find information about editing practice, the activities it describes are bafflingly varied. ‘What an editor does all day and why he does it is usually a mystery to an author and just as much of a mystery to most of the people inside a publishing house,’ writes Clarkson Potter, an editor-turned-publisher (1990: 82–83).

The result is that editing, as a subject in its own right, is not talked about very often—not even by the people who do it. Editors are by and large reluctant to draw attention to their own work, perceiving it as something that could harm the text’s relationship with both author and reader. The reluctance is captured in the comments of veteran book editor Thomas McCormack, who wrote that editors ‘are always in the “backroom” [and] that’s where we should be’ (1988: 95).

The collection of interviews presented here is an attempt to fill some of the gaps and silences. The interviews came about as part of a larger research project, a PhD that analyses editing in a comparative way. Not all of that work is covered here. In particular, a mapping of editing theory and practice through time, in the past and in the digital present, is the subject of another book to come.

← 1 | 2 → Why editing?

Why bother to fill this particular gap in our knowledge, in the first place? And does anyone care?

I start by admitting my own bias, because I am writing from personal experience; first as a writer and editor in journalism and publishing and now, from the vantage point of a second career, as a teacher on a writing programme. I hope that my perspective has been transformed by viewing the topic through the lens of scholarship.

I have also discovered that curiosity about editing is shared by others, especially if they have ever tried to wrangle sense out of a text for other people’s benefit. The huge expansion of social media and self-publishing has brought this experience home to an audience extending well beyond the world of professional editors, and has stimulated discussion about the ways in which we mediate texts. It also speaks to writers seeking an audience who have learned that pre-submission editing, of a high enough quality, will help their work find a publisher; and to the many people now teaching and studying different forms of media practice, for example at universities and colleges.

Why interviews?

Why fill the gap, specifically, with a book of interviews? Anyone wishing to know how writers approach their work suffers no lack of choice. A large and growing literature describes and explains the author’s experience of the writing process, in memoirs, ‘how-to’ guides, essays and interviews.¹ But when it comes to editors and editing, the torrent turns into a trickle. It is rare to find accounts of editing as an everyday activity, or interviews with the people who work on the production of texts.

In scholarly works, with some exceptions,² editing as a specific subject can become lost within more broadly defined studies, and so potential new areas of research are lost to view. A review of scholarship about magazines notes, for example, that editing ‘has not been viewed as a body, its parts having been published at wide intervals in a disparate range of publications and made relatively inaccessible due to poor cataloguing and indexing’ (Jolliffe 1995: 52). The comment was published 20 years ago, but the landscape has not changed much since then.