Editor, unedited

Notes from a month spent not writing

It began with an editing job, one that took most of my time and all of my mind. I gave myself a week off. 

When the job overflowed into a second week, and some significant life events happened, panic overflowed my mind, and I didn’t even think about writing. On the third week, I had given in, looked away from the thought that I had missed so many of my own deadlines. 

On this, the fourth, work and life have eased up. I still didn’t know what to write about when I woke up this morning, though. 

So I looked back, and found a short piece I’d written at the end of week one. I’d filed it as an exercise in self-involved introspection not suitable for sharing, or even looking at again myself. And perhaps it is, but it is also an artefact of a time and a feeling, so I am sharing it here. 

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Editor, unedited

Sunday 31st March 

I have set myself a task. This piece will be unedited, written one sentence after another, no looking back. I have half an hour before I must stop, a deadline for sanity’s sake. (Though I allow myself spell check because that is one step too close to chaos/loss.) At the moment, the separation of editor and writer seems like the only way I can force myself to the page. 

Being an editor is, I often think, some form of madness. 

Last week I started line editing a novel. A brilliant voice, a debut that felt unrestrained in its greatness and yet I turned myself in circles around it. A reflection of my mind, constantly seeking error where there was none (or was there?)

(This piece will also carry many parentheses, my mind constantly picking holes in its sentences.)

To edit is to question. Question the author; oneself; the limits of language, of narrative itself.

To edit is to inhabit the multitude of minds who will read the novel on behalf of the author, a mother hoping to protect a child (but who is the child here?) 

To edit is to imagine all offence: offence you may give as editor; offence the author may give, words twisted by others who seek to misunderstand. (Or do they, is this simply my adrenalised consciousness talking?) 

To edit is to see your own bias and head it off at the pass. (Missing the bias in that in the process.) Correcting, over correcting, under. 

I read my words, my comments listed down the sides of the page like my own woodpecking thoughts: ‘unconventional, consistency, misspelling, meaning, sense, sense sense,’ and wonder if my own has left me. 

I remember editing like this before. A feeling that even now I feel as acid in my throat, a tightening of my jaw. Editing for fifty, sixty hours a month on top of my normal role; I edited each book at least twice, some eight times, and nowhere in the schedule did it seem to be accounted for. A labour of love, expected by my employers, that often became only labour, the book itself lost in the layers of minds I was seeing it through. 

I have been reading Olivia Laing’s yet-to-be-published work, The Garden Against Time, (an exercise in self-flagellation – why am I not able, as she is, to transform her life and words into books that sing). She writes about her project restoring a garden. Walled, like the world of Literature she walks so effortlessly about in. I read the first few chapters and then Googled the courses I would like to take so that I could be like her. History and Ancient Greek and Mediaeval English and Creative Writing. Places walled by ten thousand a year fees. (If only I hadn’t had a breakdown in my A Level years, hadn’t sunk into depression at university fuelled by my own bad decisions, hadn’t withdrawn from university life and missed those lectures where those gardens might have opened to me, had found a way to write when all I did was work; a familiar pathway in my mind, it leads steeply downhill and I trip down it like a child unable to stop its wildly beating legs.) When I come up for air it is too late, another day is wasted on my failings and another’s success. Those words, failure, success, they haunt me, those false dichotomies (is that terminology right, I don’t know without Google?) 

What has this to do with anything? Perhaps that editing is like being a gardener. Overprune, and the flower dies. Pay no attention and it becomes overwhelmed by weeds. 

(But there is another perhaps that nags. What if, like the artificial spaces humans have created over the centuries and called Eden, to edit is to create order where there should be none? What if the imposition of another’s mind is simply an attempt at mastery where none should be master?) 

I think I need a rest. But tugging me along, the same force I have felt before. A need to complete, a connection to the story, a compulsion that closes off the world. 

Ah yes, this is what I have been circling around: sometimes editing seems to close off my own words, as well as the world. I haven’t written a piece for my Substack this week; it wasn’t a lack of time, exactly, but that I had nothing in the place ideas hide in my mind. 

And another confession, since I am confessing everything: I have worked no more on my novel since last summer. 

Months told in the books (so many brilliant books by so many talented people) I’ve helped birth. [One final parenthesis, added later: am I allowing myself an easy excuse here, when what it really is, deep down, is fear?]

My time is up now, back to editing.

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I read my badly expressed words now and cringe. I want to edit myself badly, want to edit my past self who so quickly got lost after just one job, was simply a bit overwhelmed by life.  

But we all fail sometimes, all writers experience periodic loss; of words, story, self. It seems to me that being a writer is one long cycle of losing and finding. Perhaps the answer lies in seeing that as part of the art, and part of the life. And the only way back is to face it and try again. No easy method, no tried-and-true route to being Olivia Laing, or any of the other writers we admire. Or perhaps that is simply my way of doing it, and if so, I have to embrace it.

With my job — before when I was in-house, and now — my work is not my own, my motivation is not about me. It is so much easier to prioritise others than ourselves. It is so much easier to edit others' work than our own. So much easier to give advice than take it. So much easier to do what feels safe than face the fear. Easier to cut back than plant in the vast tract of open soil. 

I feel I am circling a conclusion here, when I am not sure there is one. 

For now, I aim for only this: to keep putting some words on a page, every so often, even if they never get published here or in a book. A row of seeds, tiny black specks, ellipses that may eventually lead somewhere.  

Photo by Maksym Kaharlytskyi on Unsplash