EDITORS ON EDITING

Editors on Editing, Grove Press (1993), edited by Gerald Gross, is an anthology of what editors have to say about their work.

Richard Marek’s essay, Why Books are Chosen: What Goes into Making an Editorial Decision, is of great interest to me, and I hope to you, too.

Here are the factors that he feels seal the deal for him:

1. unique voice or vision.
2. pacing
3. plotting
4. verisimilitude: the ability to create something that sounds true
5. gift for characterization
6. style
7. dialogue.

Oh, sure, now it’s easy, you might say. Yeah, right. But I decided to case some books on my shelves to see how other writers have succeeded in filling the bill.

L.M. Montgomery’s classic, Anne of Green Gables, begins:

“Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies’ eardrops and traversed by a brook that had its source way back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place; it was reputed to be an intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through these woods, with dark secrets of pools and cascade; but by the time it reached Lynde’s hollow, it was a quiet, well-conducted little stream, for not even a brook could run past Mrs. Rachel Lynde’s door without due regard for decency and decorum; it probably was conscious that Mrs. Lynde was sitting at her window, keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed, from brooks and children up, and that if she noticed anything odd or out of place she would never rest until she had ferreted out the whys and wherefores and thereof.”

Imagine that in 1908 when it was first published and in the 50’s when it was reprinted, that young people enjoyed reading a book with such long, complicated, Anita Brookner-type sentences! Certainly Montgomery has created verisimilitude by giving such specific details about the brook, the type of flora, and Mrs. Rachel Linde, the town busybody. For all its dashing about through the landscape, the brook becomes as important a character as Mrs. Linde whom we haven’t yet met but surely know because of Montgomery’s gift for characterization. Although the sentences are long, the semicolons give the writing a quick pace, like the brook until it slows down before it gets to the busybody. And although we don’t yet know the plot, Montgomery has built up the reader’s curiosity and desire to go on and find out what happens.

John Burnham Schwartz’s novel, The Commoner, is written in the plainspoken style of a folk story or fairy tale:

“In the years before the war, my family lived in Shibuya Ward, in a large house with a walled garden. The sake brewing company that my father, Tsuneysau Endo, had inherited from his father grew and prospered under his guidance, making him a respected leader in the business community. My mother’s family was older and more distinguished than my father’s, a fact that she never promoted nor attempted to hide. As for me, born in 1934, the Year of the Dog, I was an only child and wore the proper skirts that my mother laid out for me each morning. I was fond of tennis, history, and calligraphy. There was, I suppose, nothing remarkable about me as a child, save for my father’s love, for it was to me that he told his favorite stories.”

Now the reader is all ears, wanting to be told the father’s favorite stories as well. The pacing is a leisurely unfolding instead of an action beginning that shows the conflict right off. Again, we believe in this character and the world she is in (verisimilitude.) because of the specific details for the father’s business, the mother’s background, what the child (the speaker of this story) tells about herself. My favorite detail that endears me to hear immediately is when she says there is nothing remarkable about herself. The reader is sure that that we will find out that she’s quite remarkable and will want to know why and how by reading on.

In Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys’ revision of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, focuses on Bertha, the madwoman locked in the attic of an English manor.

“They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were not in their ranks. The Jamaican ladies had never approved of my mother, ‘because she was pretty like pretty self’ Christine said.

She was my father’s second wife, far too young for him, they thought, and worse still, a Martinique girl. When I asked her why so few people came to see us, she told me the road from Spanish town to Coulibri Estate where we lived was very bad and now road repairing was a thing of the past. (My father, visitors, horses, feeling safe in their bed—all belonged to the past.”

Rhys sets us immediately in an exotic world of danger and political and social strife. Again, she gives this world believability through the precise details: the names of places, the Caribbean language. “She was pretty like pretty self,” instead of “she was pretty as prettiness itself.” We can already see by the situation that Rhys is going to take us along on a thrilling plot. The speaker of the story and her mother are already characters as outsiders in a hostile place, a sure-fire way to grab readers’ interest.

No one can keep all the editorial points in the forefront of you mind as you write, but keeping them in the back of your mind is sure to help.

Rochelle Jewel Shapiro is author of Miriam the Medium (Simon & Schuster) and has published essays in NYT (Lives), Newsweek (My Turn), et. al. Her essay, ESS, ESS, is just out in FEED ME: WRITERS DISH ABOUT FOOD, EATING, WEIGHT, AND BODY IMAGE, ed. by Harriet Brown (Random House, 2009). She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in poetry. She teaches Writing the Personal Essay at UCLA extension.