In the past, many people have asked me what it is an Editor actually does. As a job description, it lies somewhere in the public consciousness alongside the Z-list celebrity whom no one can quite place.
Fame.
It's also a very hard question to answer. Depending on the company and the specific publication, working in publishing can entail:
- hours of performing as a human spell-check
- untangling endless webs of copyright information which seem to suggest the original licencee may or may not have been fictional
- falling asleep at the photocopier
- gasping in horror at budgets
- screaming in horror at schedules
- recoiling in horror from suggested illustration concepts
- noticing a misplaced comma at last minute and interrupting the production schedule out of sheer bloody mindedness
An unreferenced quotation!
There is also a certain amount of cajoling, threatening and hand-holding of authors through the process of producing a chapter or so's worth of work. And that's just for starters. Overall, however, I would say that the publishing industry's primary role is to make the finished book appear effortless. At any cost. I've always been sceptical of the story of Samuel Taylor Coleridge composing the epic poem Kubla Khan having dreamed it in full the night before. I would put money on there having been a tired and frustrated Editor somewhere in the background. Probably with a red pen. (Perhaps that explains the poem's missing finale?)
Personally, most of my experience has been gained in the educational market. Although this does mean occasionally ploughing through third revisions of thousand page physics textbooks, I enjoy the challenge. Educational publishing has a clearer aim than most. We try and turn this:
Into this:
Dead Poet's Society. Ah, man. They were just so inspired.
The challenge of taking a large chunk of information written by an expert in his or her field and attempting to make it engaging to a bored teenage audience should not be underestimated. When reviewing the text, it is often very tempting to try and slip in a bit of humour (especially if the Editor is me. I like cheap gags).
In the past, I did attempt to occasionally squeeze a joke or two into passages I judged to be excessively dry. My superiors brought me up short and I don't blame them.
A few weeks back, my boyfriend and I took our open water scuba diver's course. Although it might seem like a fairly easy concept (breathe through this, swim with this, don't tease the sharks), apparently scuba diving is complicated enough to require the reading of an entire textbook prior to so much as paddling in the shallow end.
Poke Poke
The world hasn't seen the level of procrastination I put into this task since the uni exam season of '08. For someone who occasionally reads text books for a living, I'm a very bad student. My room was impeccable, my dog walked to near-exhaustion, my Twitter page a riot of updates. Things only got worse when I succumbed to the inevitable and sat down to actually read the thing. IT TRIED TO BE FUNNY.
It started off small scale:
'You've probably noticed you can't breathe underwater'
Heh. Yes, yes I have.
It then warmed to its theme by seemingly getting increasingly irate about the fact that fish are genetically superior swimmers; 'Of course, fish wouldn't need to do this...' 'Since you're not a fish...' etc.
At this point, I started mentally writing a letter addressed to the Editors in which I would take the stance that, although sans gills, I refused to be made to feel belittled by a bunch of aquatic wannabes.
Just sayin'...
That's when I noticed the 'joke' answer.
'Does the BWARF of the predive safety chack stand for d: BCD, Wolverine, Releases, Air and Final OK?'
A safety wolverine, yesterday.
Although in hindsight it just looks like a harmless trick question, at the time - 150 endless pages in - I was genuinely annoyed that they had tried to make me laugh.
Things got worse on the course itself. Most of the classroom sessions were supposed to take the form of students sitting very still and watching an absurdly 90s video taking you through the various stages of controlled drowning. I searched everywhere for it online, but to no avail. It was, essentially, this:
The 90s encapsulated
Although it was a rare nice weekend (Sod's Law I'd pick that one to remain largely underwater), the group acquiesced readily enough. Bombarded with images of tremendously 90s people laughing in aquatic situations, things got a little tetchy after we were reassured for the second time that 'Yes! It is possible to dive whilst remaining stylish! We have it in red, too!' . Then the "comedy character" came into shot. In each section, an actor closely resembling Barry from Eastenders strode onto screen. There he proceeded to prat about, getting everything wrong, in the kind of slapstick previously assumed to have died with the cancellation of The Chuckle Brothers.
Headdesk
No one laughed. In diving's long and illustrious history, I can't imagine anyone has ever laughed at that poor man. Having sacrificed a weekend to learning to scuba, we were instead being subjected to someone else's idea of a joke.
Eventually, our instructor took pity on us and ushered us outside, where we proceeded to learn (and pass) what was needed by listening, asking questions and chatting. He turned out to be a dry, quick-witted man.
The problem, i suppose, is that learning isn't inherently funny. Unlike The Hitchhiker's Guide or Louis C.K, that isn't its purpose. Learning things can be fun when interpreted by a good teacher who understands his or her audience and can convey information in the right way. An educational book's purpose is to be informative, clear and to give the teacher all the tools needed to do their job - including making people laugh. As soon as it tries to cut out the middle-man, it strays from that purpose.
Insert Punchline.
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