Books, Publishing, and the Zealous Editor

Jul 28, 2009 by Dr. David Field

What do you do when your editor takes his title of editor too literally and wants to edit your book to oblivion? Let me tell you a story (with interruptions) to illustrate my point. The story is entitled: ‘What happened to my manuscript?’ ‘The book was sent off on March 5th.’

I am talking to Blasted and Co., a publishing firm to whom I submitted a manuscript almost four months ago. They requested that I send them the entire book. So at great expense, my book was posted from Littlehampton in the Wold, Shropshire, England, where I, Oswald Spinfrith live, to Anchorage, Alaska, where Blasted and Co. have their godforsaken office. ‘The fifth of March,’ I repeated. ‘Oh! My!’ replied this Alaskan voice with the Hollywood accent. ‘I was wondering if it had gone astray,’ I said. ‘Astray?’ she queried. Don’t they that have that word in Alaska? passed through my mind. ‘Gone missing, got lost somehow,’ I explained.

‘Oh, geee, no! Books never do that. We’re awful careful. What was the book called, sir?’ ‘Waste Bin.’ ‘Come again,’ she replied. ‘Waste Bin – er, like you say trash can!’ She giggled down the phone. ‘Oh! I see. And you never heard anything from us?’ ‘Not a sausage,’ I unwisely replied. ‘Aah!’ she squeaked at me. Maybe that was another expression which they don’t use in Alaska? There was silence, a significant pause.

She was probably weighing up the pros and cons of an author who wrote a book about trash cans and brought up the subject of sausages quite gratuitously when talking with a relative stranger. ‘Well, sir,’ she began at last, ‘I’ll get our senior editor, Mr. Proudfoot, to ring you back as soon as we have located your manuscript.’ An hour later the telephone rang. ‘Proudfoot!’ drawled an American accent. ‘Ringing from Blasted and Company! Mr…’ he stumbled a moment. Obviously he’d forgotten my name.

I didn’t feel like helping him out. ‘Oh! Jolly good. Thanks for ringing back,’ I began in my most suave English manner, designed to rile an American to the core. ‘Well, sir, we located your manuscript and…’ ‘Good, good,’ I interrupted, suddenly a bit nervous. What was he going to say? It was only fit for the trash can? ‘I must apologise for the delay. The reader who was allocated it was attacked by a polar bear. The poor man lost an arm.’ Whaaat? I felt my brain expand by ten per cent inside my head. ‘I mean…I mean,’ I began to stutter, ‘does that happen often?’ What a stupid question. Too late. It had come out. ‘Not so often,’ came the reply. ‘But since they’ve been protecting bears in Alaska, there’s a lot of them about up in the north. The reader was on holiday – took your book with him. Tragedy really. But he can still read. Of course the shock did set him back a bit. He dictated his report just a couple of weeks ago. We just got it typed out. Sorry about the delay.’

He cleared his throat, as if preparing himself for an important statement. He was preparing himself for an important statement, actually. ‘I’m afraid the manuscript got a bit mauled,’ he continued. ‘By the bear of course. Our man was sitting reading it outside his tent when the darned animal crept up on him. He was so absorbed in your book that he couldn’t reach for his gun in time. Well, sir, he only read half of it before the accident. The rest is strewn about the arctic wastes, so to speak.’

So it was my fault, I was thinking. This poor bloke was sitting enthralled by my masterwork when he was attacked by a polar bear. ‘Very well, my God, the poor guy,’ I said down the phone. ‘Okay, look,’ said Proudfoot. ‘He liked what he read. We’ll publish it!’ Whaaaa! I shouted to myself. ‘But you’ll have to send us a new version of course. We only have up to page 153.’ ‘Right I’ll do that! I’ll post it today!’ I’m going to be published. I’m going to be published – and I did a little dance around the phone, waggling the receiver up and down. Everyone told me that it would cost an arm and a leg to get my book published. But it only cost an arm, I reflected. Bad joke! The poor guy, I repeated to myself.

Things happened quite fast after that. It was only a couple of months and I got the marked up manuscript back last week. Now this is where the trouble started. It wasn’t just that I had quoted Isaac Newton and they wanted to correct his spelling. ‘It should surely be Chemistry, not Chymistry, Mr. Spinfrith!’ That was only the half of it. They wanted to re-write the blooming book, so far as I could see. Edited by Howard Proudfoot with contributions from the author Oswald Spinfrith should be what appears on the cover. So what this article is about is what to do when your editor/publisher wants to re-write your book for you.

Just to interrupt the tale and step back a moment and assume my real persona, that of a professional scientist, my experience is that this problem of an editor re-writing your work – scientific papers in my case – can certainly happen. It’s pretty rare nowadays I think, but maybe more common if your first language is not English. The august Astronomy journal ‘Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society’, one of the world’s oldest journals, had a crusty old editor – himself an excellent scientist, I may add – who was (genuinely) called John Skakeshaft.

Many years ago, I received a manuscript back from him and I started, naturally enough, by reading the abstract – a sort of blurb which appears before the main body of the text of a scientific paper. I read this abstract twice, wondering how on earth I could have come to write such stuff. It took me a little time to find out that I had not written it. The whole blessed thing had been re-written by Dr. J. R. Shakeshaft. We came to some sort of compromise. That, of course, is the point: compromise – but without compromising your work! Let us return to the publishing tale.

First Mr. Proudfoot wanted to change the name of the chief character. He wanted to make it acceptable to an American audience, he said. I know that we, the British, and the Americans are divided by a common language, but I could not for the life of me see why my main character should not be called Harold Nutsworth. Proudfoot rang me up about this just a couple of days ago, laughing it seems in embarrassment down the phone. ‘We’re a conservative Christian nation, Mr. Spinfrith.’ What’s that got to do with the price of onions? I was thinking, though I was wise enough not to vocalize this thought. Onions on top of sausages would have me written off as completely barmy. To return to the name ‘Nutsworth’. ‘Could you, sort of, spell it out, please, Mr. Proudfoot?’ ‘Well,’ there was a pregnant pause – pregnant was the word as it turned out.

‘Well,’ began Proudfoot again, ‘Nuts’ in the US means, er, testicles, sir. Anybody called Nutsworth would be in for a hard time, over here.’ ‘Okay, it’s like calling someone Gooliesworth, I suppose, in the UK.’ ‘No problem with that,’ replied Proudfoot, ‘Gooliesworth it is, then.’ ‘No it isn’t!’ He must have misheard me. ‘Gooliesworth this side of the Atlantic is the equivalent of Nutsworth on your side of the Atlantic!’ At the suggestion of my secretary (a.k.a. my wife) I rang up the McVitie biscuit company and they confirmed that they had been forced to agree to change the name of Ginger Nuts for export to the US. So Howard Proudfoot was not completely off-beam.

So I compromised on the name. Nutsworth became Tunsworth, an anagram of testicles. I had to have my little victory. And so it went on. ‘Do you feel that your readers will know that Sir Isaac Newton wore long johns throughout the year and …. blah, blah, blah?’ ‘Are you sure that the plot of grass around the foot of a sundial is call a ‘wabe’?’ ‘Why do you refer to cat’s fur and amber suddenly in the middle of page 225? What has this got to do with Professor Whewell – and who is he anyway?’ etc. etc. But that was not the worst part. These were just details which arose from my many years of collecting useless information. It is true that fragments of this information tend to crop up in the Dust Bin at unexpected places, interrupting the flow of the story and throwing the reader off track.

‘Yes, Mr. Proudfoot,’ I am saying testily down the phone as he queries yet another passage, ‘I know that the cultivation of orchids seems irrelevant and indeed is never referred to again in the book,’ and so on. Actually this part of the problem of being edited – dealing with detailed criticism – has inspired me to suggest a new tactic. Always include in your book some stuff which you would be perfectly happy to get rid of. So when your editor starts to quibble, you remove the stuff and honour is satisfied. Occupy the high ground from the very start.

But to return again to Mr. Proudfoot: as I said, the devil may be in the detail, with lots of small points cropping up. But now it turns out that Howard Proudfoot wants to undermine the whole thrust of the book, so to speak. The Dust Bin is about the Dust Bin of History, about how many, many details have been lost and with these details great insight into the lives of both famous men and women but most of all of the common people. What greeted the middle class lawyer on £100 per year in 1813 when he came home to his wife in the evening? What was everyday life like for him? What were the pies like down the pub, or rather, the inn – did they have crispy or soggy pastry? Mr.Tunsworth is this lawyer, the common middle class man on £100 per year.

Why have we never read about the Tunsworths of this world? Howard Proudfoot is insisting that the reason is that Tunsworth is boring. According to my dear editor, because Mr. Tunsworth is never successful, does not become Lord Chief Justice, is never a celebrity, a star, then the reading public would be bored with the book after 150 pages (and therefore would not risk being mauled by a polar bear). I had, or rather have, according to my assiduous editor, to turn Tunsworth into a superstar. ‘But, Mr. Proudfoot, you must understand that it is Tunsworth’s very mediocrity that is the point.’ Silence. ‘But I am quite happy to remove the exclamation mark on line 17 of page 135, as you suggest.’ See what I mean – throw in a few sops. But Proudfoot only grunts in reply. Proudfoot is not having it. Proudfoot knows what sells to the elk-shooting public of Alaska. ‘Around here, they are more interested in shooting elk than in Mr. Tunsworth’s chilblains,’ he replies.

‘I don’t think that I can bring the murder of harmless elk into a book about 19th century London. And you should remember that Erasmus had chilblains – when he was in Queens’ College in Cambridge. Chilblains are not without their historical interest.’ ‘No, I suppose not. Nor are haemorroids either but….’ puts in Proudfoot, ‘You are right there,’ I interrupt. ‘When the Pope was asked to agree to the divorce between Henry VIIIth and Catherine of Aragon…’ ‘Mr. Spinfrith!’ broke in my editor. ‘Please see what you can do with Tunsworth. Liven him up a bit. Let’s say that he catches the Prince of Wales when he falls off his horse, acts as his lawyer against the dog-owner whose dog barked at the prince’s horse. Get in a bit of glamour.’

Glamour! Well, I am experimenting with Tunsworth acting for a highwayman who will be hanged at Tyburn. You see what I mean: compromise. Throw a few titbits to the editor and, while he scrabbles around after them, build up defences to protect your work from major interference. I am simply not having Tunsworth seconded from his lawyer’s practice to act as a spy in the spearhead of a plan to retake North America for the British crown, with Tunsworth surviving in the wastes of Montana only by shooting elk (if there are elk in Montana).

So the story of the Dust Bin ends, for the present at any rate. To return to reality, I have only experienced very non-interfering editors. A friend of mine in Paris who is a rather well known writer told me that she wished that her editor would interfere a bit more and come with some suggestions for change. That is the other side of the coin. If you write a long scientific paper, say, 20 pages or a 500 page novel, and there are practically no suggestions for improvement at all, you feel a little bit cheated. Have the referees or publishers actually read your stuff?

At the same time it is essential to learn to take constructive criticism in good part and not just burst into tears when told that certain passages are a mess – as one or two of my PhD students have done in the past. This is especially tough with ‘favourite passages’. I refer you to Roaul Dahl’s statement that if you feel that you have written something really good, you are probably in deep trouble. There may be rollicking pages of wonderfully amusing banter, which you loved writing. However, they interrupt the story terribly. Or there may be exciting technical detail. But do we really want to know, as the hero encounters the villain in a paper mill, of the history of paper making? Sometimes, prompted by the editor, these wonderful passages must be condemned to death and the critical guillotine must fall, ridding your work of the pollution of noble but superfluous content – like this last ridiculous sentence.

As an exercise for the reader, rather than do it myself, it would be interesting to go back through the present article and remove superfluous and distracting material. I suspect that there would not be much left.


David Field is a professor of Astrophysics at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. He has published numerous articles in many Astronomy and Physics journals. His most recent novel, The Fairest Star, the third installment of his Friends and Enemies Trilogy, has just been published. For more information, please visit David’s website here.

Read more wonderful articles from Dr. David Field’s pen at The Cuckleburr Times right here.