Fruits of labour

Some simple realities of the Indian editorial scene. All editors are overworked and underpaid and cannot possibly read everything that crosses their desks with keen attention. Do not presume editors are smart merely because they are editors. Writers need not listen to everything the editor tells them. In any case, writers ought always to be the ultimate arbiters of what they do. Hence the question: If everything the author does is acceptable, what are editors left to do?

Editing is about reshaping, revising and/or rewriting a typescript. Which means taking out everything that is not relevant: purging sentences of useless words and paragraphs of useless sentences. But the ground reality is that we do not have editors who are qualified to do so: neither their educational background nor their experience makes them competent to undertake the minor surgeries that are often required because most Indian writers write too much to say too little.

Even if we assume that there are some editors who can perform the delicate tasks, there is another problem that crops up time and again. Much of Indian publishing is ruled by the celebrity status of the author. This makes it difficult for an editor to make the necessary ‘cuts’.

There are still two major functions that editors have to perform if a good book has to be published: copy editing and fact-checking. The first means making the ‘copy’ consistent in every respect: standardized spellings, italicizing foreign words and expressions, making the presentation of dates and statistical data uniform, and so on. With rapid computerization of all production processes, the copy editor today has to be computer-literate. For one thing, almost all typescripts now are submitted in electronic files. There is far too much information available and the copy editor must know what to weed out or check against standard reference books.

Fact-checking is another major function of editors now because there is too much information available on the internet, much of which is not accurate. Online fact-checking that many Indian editors resort to is an easy way out but could be quite risky. Traditional reference manuals — updated encyclopedias, subject dictionaries, maps and atlases — are perhaps more relevant today because of untrustworthy electronic information.

Clearly, the rules of the game have changed for editors over the past decade. They need to be computer-savvy to an extent, but they also need to be suspicious of the tech-revolution. Perhaps the words of the German-Swiss playwright, Max Frisch, that “technology is the knack of so arranging the world that you no longer need to experience it”, need to be kept in mind. Only experience and a close reading of the text could cut down a 1,000-page book to half its size to make it twice as good. But how do editors tackle the VIP’s clout and power?