One part of the creative world that drives us into the DIY and indie corners is the idea of having to give your work over to abusive editors.
Everyone is familiar with stories about movies whose scripts are butchered, directors are forced to change entire endings to suit the random whims of studio execs and stars that demand fundamental story ideas are changed to suit their persona.
In writing and journalism there is a similar culture but we are told it's normal and a vital part of the process.
There are many different ideas here and, as usual, it will help us to sift them a little.
Let's try writing as a simple example.
In my mind there are only two kinds of editing. I'm not going to use accepted industry terms here exactly because they are loaded and abusive. Here we go:
1) Checking and correcting spelling and punctuation errors, that have little or no effect on the meaning of the language.
2) Changing words and sentences, rewriting lines of speech, cutting and adding scenes.
These are debatable but I'm sure you can see the distinction I am making. Unless you are a genius who can write a finished work on the first attempt from brain to page, you will use both these steps. The second step is actually the fun part of writing.
Now some more points:
You can do both of these yourself.
You can enlist the help of another person.
As I wrote here, I get someone to read my work and give a personal response. This helps me to make decisions when editing. That is, when I edit my work myself. They also make suggestions as to possible changes, which I then take under consideration. I am free to try them or not.
What I don't do is give it to someone to fuck around with as they think it would work. Of course, you could choose to do that, sure. Real problems start when you are forced to submit to this. This is what I find intolerable to the indie mind.
There is a clear difference between the general idea of editing - and a particular culture of editing within a given organisation. Although you will be told otherwise.
There are three areas that immediately pop into my head:
1)The grey area
2)The production line
3)Pure hubris
First, the grey area. The vast majority of editing staff at magazines, newspapers and even publishing houses for full length books don't make the distinction that I do in editing. They see a lot of what I term number two as number one. That is, changing the order of sentences, changing certain words or lines of dialogue, even omitting whole paragraphs is seen as basic correction. A publisher will assign an editor to your novel whose sole job is to revise your drafts.
I see all this as insane behaviour.
An author may choose to write in a confusing way, or play with conventions or simply be happy with a stream of consciousness that is rough and want to put it out there. Again, you may choose to work collaboratively - but that's your choice.
Second, the production line. Sometimes this system is adopted to fit a practical way of working such as in a newspaper. Time is short and separate parts of the writing are assigned to separate people. It seems annoying but understandable. It soon spirals out of control though, for reasons explained in the next section. Indie writers are better off creating zines or writing blogs.
Third, hubris. Do click on that and be sure of the exact meaning. You see, there is another element to all this. These editors are basically manager level jobs in a hierarchy. They are part of an organisation in which the basic writing is at the bottom. They have power over you ...
...they are gatekeepers.
The notion that you are at their whim and that they are free to inflict editing on you at will quickly escalates to near psychotic levels in almost all cases. This disease spreads to all gatekeepers of their industry and it seems that everyone you meet wants you to make immediate changes in your work. It even turns into a kind of reflex action.
Me and Jake have a book outline with samples based on our music writing in Shanghai. I was in touch with a New York based agent. She mentioned the idea to an editor at Random House and we were asked to pitch. So I turned in our chapter list, synopsis and sample chapter. We had tried to cut the whole foreign adventures in crazy China approach and go journalistic and base each chapter on an issue or comparison.
Despite it being the editor's job to make comment on our project, we had to go through the agent who had her own ideas. She told us to drop the political/issue aspect and make it more like our first person travels. We were trying to avoid that and the offer had come from the original idea. But, I wrote an introduction chapter in the style she wanted and sent it in. It then came back butchered by notes and with the message that we shouldn't go with travel writing but go issue based and journalistic instead.
Not only did I realize that the agent was acting arbitrarily but that I had very wrong expectations. Those companies are private companies with no responsibility for anything other than their profit. They have a culture. There is little or no point getting involved with them.
As always, we should just go indie.
Just remember:
editing (the concept) ≠ a certain culture of editing
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