Editing Yourself: The Serpentine Search

It's nearly the end of the semester, and my graduate CW students are still churning out gorgeous, moving work.  Unbelievable.  They're just fantastic. 

One thing students sometimes ask me for is a recommendation for a book about revising/editing their own work, and I usually come up short, because although I really love several books about writing, the idea of a whole book about editing sounds deadly, so I don't usually pick up books like that in the first place.  Yawnfest. 

I've recommended Betsy Lerner's The Forest for the Trees: An Editor's Advice to Writers before, but I'm not wild about it:  honestly, it's a little too big-picture for what most students are seeking.  They want something more hands-on, more immediately useful.  John Gardner's "Common Errors" chapter in The Art of Fiction is just as useful for writers of nonfiction as it is for fiction writers, if you can get past his persnickety tone (his advice on getting rid of filters and on letting sentences' structures echo their sense is, by itself, worth the price of the book--especially for those memoirists who want to open every paragraph with "I remember"), and of course there's always Strunk and White.  But nothing perfect ever crossed my path.

However, I discovered a wonderful, helpful book over the Thanksgiving break, and I'm hoping I may have at last found the editing-book grail.  The Artful Edit:  On the Practice of Editing Yourself by Susan Bell is really turning out to be exactly what the New York Times said it was:  "Short, helpful, original."

Here's Bell herself:

"Writers live with many fears--of success, of failure, of a ten-year project garnering a one-year paycheck.  Their greatest fear, however, is of their own intimate voice, and they find many ways to subvert hearing it."

Um, yep.  Tell me about it.  So it's nice that she gets writers, rather than looking down on us as the slobs whose work she's been hired to correct.  And:

"We are loath to put an objective ear to our subjective selves.  But to edit is to listen, above all; to hear past the emotional filters that distort the sound of our all too human words; and then to make choices rather than judgments."

Choices rather than judgments.  Nice. 

I like Bell's non-invasive, non-intrusive approach, too.  Her thoughts on editing run parallel to my own views on teaching:

There are those who believe that providing answers to a writer's questions or solutions to his errors is the definition of editing.  Answers, however, halt the serpentine search that a writer often needs to make to solve a problem.  New valuable ideas may appear during the search.  This doesn't mean that an editor can't sometimes find the right word or phrase before a writer does.  It happens.  But the few words found can't compare to the verbal clusters a text needs that the writer alone can find.  Answers are a very small part of the job.  Guidance is the gist.  A text deserves to be pondered and nudged, not simply bullied into place.  No editor can, with crystal clarity, know the precise place her author's work ought to go.

Nor can any teacher.  Which is not to say that there's no time and place for a clear No.  :)  

Bell's first chapter offers eleven practical strategies for gaining distance on your text, and I was heartened by her suggestions, since I've used several of them myself and can attest to their effectiveness--like

writing your first draft longhand,
reading your work aloud (to yourself or a bribed loved one),
editing your printouts in a different physical space from where you write, and
laying the printout out on the floor or taping it to the wall to get a sense of structure. 

(I've done both of these last ones, though I haven't yet hung it on a clothesline, as she suggests.)  For this last, if you're working with a long manuscript, print it out in a wee font.  Then "[p]eruse for proportions," as Bell says.  She has several more strategies that I look forward to trying.

I'm hoping the whole book turns out to be as good.  In the meantime, consider it a recommendation.  Happy editing!