| |
|
Alex: You're quite correct in that an editor's job will vary immensely in accordance with hir circumstances. Newspaper and newsmagazine editors—as well as editors of technical manuals and instructional material—concern themselves primarily with (a) factual accuracy and (b) clarity: style and le mot juste factor very little into the equation. Accuracy and clarity are just as important to your lifestyle magazines, but there's another, more subtle editorial function here—the maintenance of a particular tone.
Look at The New Yorker. It employs some very talented writers, with strong visions—Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Orlean, Anthony Lane—but the work that appears in the magazine, although touched with individual voices, is identifiably "New Yorker prose"—middlebrow cool, balanced, understated. That tone is the end result of a strong editorial vision, and it's slightly different from the tone of, say, Harper's or The Atlantic or Vanity Fair—all of which, in turn, have their own editorial voices.
This same model of tone is presumably also the editorial remit for series fiction or "brand" fiction by divers hands—Star Trek novels, Harlequin romances (or your Mills & Boon), popular how-to and travel guides (factual accuracy is tantamount, yeah, but part of the appeal of Lonely Planet or the ________ for Dummies books is a consistent and engaging voice).
For comics, it's another story again. At Marvel and DC, a single editor will handle an entire line of related books, and will be responsible for maintaining internal consistency as well as overall thematic approach (e.g. Dan DiDio's nixing any mention of Hypertime and quashing anything he deems too silly or campy). Editorial staff may brainstorm story arcs and special events: indeed, under the classic Marvel contract the editor, rather than the nominal writer of the book, was considered, for legal purposes, the author of the work.
The role of the editor in shaping fiction will obviously vary widely with the style of the editor and the requirements of the author and the work in question. The classic model of the editor, of course, is Maxwell Perkins, who took on the punishing job of turning Thomas Wolfe's three-foot high stack of typescript into a best-selling novel. Or Ezra Pound, il miglior fabbrio, who wrestled with a version of Eliot's The Waste Land twice as long and half as good as the one we know now, and beat it into submission.
Note, however, that in none of these cases are spellchecking and punctuation the primary purviews. Proofreading is a separate, though related, function.
Oh, and these comments...
At what stage would the novel you'd ripped out bleeding from your heaving chest turn into a collaboration? If your editor's doing a lot more than using spellcheck, I'd say, then it should be a worry.
...seem to confirm your view of what a writer (or indeed, any artist) does is also only vaguely acquainted with Dame Reality.
The Lone-Promethean-Genius-Working-in-a-Holy-Vacuum thing is a pernicious myth, man. That is to say: the rankest bullshit. Making art is a job, man, a job like any other: art is a product. No product reaches the marketplace without passing through a quality-control process. And that process invariably—in-fucking-variably—makes the product a better, stronger product. |
|
|
