Without Editors We'd All Be Hacks!

Liz has an uncanny ability to detect what my intentions are and then suggest changes and modifications that will better communicate them.

Thank God for editors! They keep us poor ink-stained wretches from making fools of ourselves in print for the entire world to see.

All authors must at some point admit that it is their editors more than anyone else who make them good writers. Not only do they correct punctuation and spelling, not only do they suggest narrative changes in the manuscripts, not only do they offer encouragement and oft needed praise, but they also tell them when an idea probably isn’t worth the effort to develop it before too much time and energy is wasted on it.

Creativity, as I have maintained many times, must have obstacles to get over around and through, obstacles that force the author to hone his writing and sharpen his ideas. Having a congenial and knowledgeable editor is the greatest gift that an author can possess. Well, of course, aside from getting the first copies of the book itself, that is.

If here is anything in the world that matches the feel of a book that you have penned and had published, I don’t know what it is! It’s the sensuality of holding the hardcover in your hand, cracking it open and getting your first whiff of that “new book” aroma, coupled with the knowledge that it’s is not just any book, it’s your book; the words imprinted here are your words. But, aside from the very real sense of accomplishment, there is, I must tell you, another somewhat weirder feeling. It’s a bit surreal, you know, because the words no longer seem like yours. The transfiguration from the manuscript into the printed page, creates a distancing between author and text. No matter how familiar you are with it, in the final printed book it becomes reborn and you read it as if for the first time, and as if someone else wrote it.

Having a play produced is similar but not the same. I think it might have something to do with a sense of permanence. Writing and producing plays was once described as “writing your life in sand.” At the end of a play the only thing you have left is a marked up script and photographs. A book is as near to forever as we are likely to get in this life, and at the end of the process when I am actually holding the book on my hands, I am tempted to believe, quite hyperbolically, that it justifies my existence on this planet. I remember saying something like that about the first book, O’Shaughnessey: A Boy and His Leprechaun. “Were I to die tomorrow,” I said, “I’ll be satisfied in my mind that my life has been lived well for having written this.”

But, here am again holding the second in the series, The Faerie Circle and anticipating the third, The Changeling. I am no longer satisfied with that one book, and hope I am granted enough time and energy to complete the trilogy. But, no author does it alone.

Most writers will admit that without their editors they would be nothing, I am, however, such a pig-headed, self-sufficient cuss that I bristle at anything hinting at “collaboration.” this even though I know from my experience in the theatre the value of that “second pair of eyes.” When my play, From All Things Evil was produced I scrupulously avoided providing any input to the cast or director in the early stages of rehearsal because I wanted that “second set of eyes.” I knew what I wanted to write, but I had not the hint of an idea what I actually did write. “If it isn’t in the words, it isn’t there,” I said. As it turned out, the actors found things I didn’t know I had written and I was pleasantly surprised. I learned a lesson then that has served me ever since.

The disconnect between what the author thought he wrote and what is actually on the page is called “the Intentional Fallacy.” We err in thinking that if we choose our words well, our unspoken intentions will be immediately evident to anyone. This is nonsense. I know it. Yet I still balk at anyone else telling me how to write! I am so aware of this territorial instinct that I have to actively work against it when working with editors to the point that I sometimes become a passive observer taking any and all suggestions. When this happens, it is well to have an editor on hand who does not think of herself primarily as a writer, or who can differentiate and categorize their work so the writing and the editing disciplines to not become commingled. A good editor is, as Conan Doyle wrote, “not luminous…but rather a reflection of light.”

I am particularly fortunate to have found just such an editor in Elizabeth Zorko. Liz has an uncanny ability to detect what my intentions are and then suggest changes and modifications that will better communicate them. She is able to tell me when I need to say more and when I need to shut up, all while focusing on the intended audience of early teens. In one section, for example, regarding a full two pages of material that seemed more self-confessional than anything else (authors sometimes do that, you know, if you don’t watch them closely), she was quick to point out, “Your intended audience, teenagers, won’t care about that stuff. If you choose to leave it in, you’ll be writing a different book, a more adult book.” I cut the pages and the book is better for it.

Liz is also a talented musician. I have often maintained that the music of language is every bit as important as denotative meaning. She is able to detect tone, rhythm, harmony and melody, and is not averse to telling me when a note sounds a sour or when the rhythm seems a little clumsy. Liz’s sharp ear for sound is invaluable in helping me stay in tune.

If good writing must be rooted in the sounds and rhythms of the environs in which the story takes place, then the illustrations must also be rooted in life. Drawing a twelve-year-old girl that looks and moves like a twelve-year-old girl without a model is difficult to impossible. I did not want to produce a series of cartoon caricatures; yet, one really shouldn’t follow young girls around gaping at them. It was a happy accident, when I was beginning the illustrations in earnest, Liz introduced me to a young girl named Gina and her parents who kindly consented to my observing her closely and taking photographs to use in the drawings. Gina also consented to read a portion of the manuscript from the locus of the targeted twelve-year-old audience and tell me what she thought. Her comments were exceedingly valuable.

I did not know at the outset that observing her would also result in two additions to the text. Gina has that quality that directors most look for in child actors: no matter what she’s doing, even if she’s doing nothing, it’s interesting. Her expression, even in repose, seems active. There is something always going on behind the eyes.

There were two passages in the book that directly resulted from my observations of Gina. The first is a rumination about young Margaret Mahoney from the shenache, Moira McCarthy, the girl’s mentor:

The mental picture she had of Margaret made her smile. “Grace is not something that can be learned,” she mused. “One may learn deportment…but not grace.”… Deportment is external and stiff, like a coat that doesn’t quite fit right. Grace is inborn, and no matter how awkward adolescence is, that grace still shines through. The girl had it, of that the old woman was sure. The smallest gesture seemed to come quite naturally from the center where the heart lies, up through the shoulder, along the arm and finally rolling off the fingertips. That was true even when she was slouching in the wicker chair or stumbling out of the bedroom. Moira laughed warmly.

The second passage Gina inspired is Margaret’s dance just before she makes her first direct contact with Faerie. My wife and I were in the kitchen, when we saw this wild mop of blond hair bouncing along past the window and continuing on for the full length of the deck. We both laughed at the impulsiveness of Gina’s dance and agreed that it had to find its way into the book:

From some small remote corner of her came the irresistible impulse to dance. She started slowly, stepping lightly through the mist-covered grasses and waving her arms like tree branches over her head and around her shoulders. She thought she heard music rather like the sound of a violin welling up inside her; it had to be from inside her because she could not otherwise place its origin. She began to sway her shoulders and back to the strange rhythm of that music, which rose from her, seemed to be inside her and around her all at once and she gladly gave herself to it. She jumped about, her arms waved, her hair whipped around her face and down along her body as she whirled, leaped lightly and kicked her feet out in front of her. She had danced before, of course, but always hesitantly as though afraid to make the wrong step or an awkward move. This was the first time she felt herself one with the dance, felt the power grow from her center where the heart lies, up through her shoulders and arms, and down through her hips, knees, and toes, and she understood how Fionna Donnelly felt. “They couldn’t tell the dancer from the dance.” She didn’t know how long she danced. Here was no time, here was no place. Here she was alone and free, and touching eternity. A voice said, “The moment had to have been born in Faerie!”
And she stopped dancing. The world came back to her as she knew it and she looked around to find if anyone had seen her acting so foolishly.

No author ever does it alone. Writing a book may not be as collaborative as writing and staging a play, but it is not quite the isolated and solitary effort that one may think. Taking a book from the first draft to the finished book takes many hands. I have presented here two of my most valued ones without whom the O’Shaughnessey series would be much poorer.