On Being an Editor

When the phone rang to tell me that I had won the Eleanor Farjeon award it was raining hard, the first time for weeks, and I was on the way down to call in our cat Gizmo. He bounded across the lawn, howling in outrage and instead of coming straight through the catflap, insisted on my descending a further flight of stairs to let him in. ‘Just like your authors’ the bringer of the wonderful news replied, when I apologised for not answering the phone straight away.

But may I beg to differ? I am gratefully aware that it is authors who ‘let me in’. They let me in to their books; they not only let me live with the characters they have created but also interfere with what fate has in store for them. But most generously of all, they invite me into their mind, their conscience, their experience of living, their often encyclopaedic knowledge of the subject that has inspired their books. They share their imagination. They allow me to see their vision of a world they want to bring to children, to enrich them and help them understand it. In my authors’ company I have travelled in time and place. Jenny Nimmo describes writing fantasy as a means of making children free by taking them several steps out of their lives and worlds where they can feel trapped and unhappy. I think all the best children’s fiction gives the reader freedom. I can only single out a few of the authors I have worked with but that does not mean the others were not equally enriching.

With Robert Westall I empathised with children at war, with Michelle Magorian I experienced first love and post-war Britain. Theresa Breslin made me understand what it is to be a child with dyslexia. Anne Fine showed me how being brilliant is also a burden. With Jean Ure I travelled into a dystopic future. With Vivien Alcock, I experienced long before the Human Genome Project was published, the unforgettable creation of The Monster Garden. With Jamila Gavin I lived with children abandoned at the time of Partition in India and in 18th-century London and, most recently, with a Venetian boy in Moghul India. With Annie Dalton and Jenny Nimmo I lived with children with magic gifts. With Stephen Potts I discovered the Whitby whaling trade and life in Greenland. Caroline Pitcher took me to the mining community of 18th-century Derbyshire. Carlo Gebler let me see through the eyes of a Jewish boy in hiding in German-occupied France in 1944, the creation of the Golem of Prague four hundred years earlier.

I have been so fortunate to work with writers who take their cue from Plato – ‘Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling, and our story shall be the education of our heroes.’

The touching of minds

If I have to define editing it is the touching of minds, it is a dialogue. But yesterday when talking to Jenny Nimmo about her new Charlie Bone novel, The Blue Boa, she described it poetically as only Jenny would, as a duet. In the duet or dialogue writer and editor are equal, both listening to the other, really listening. Both want the book to be the best it can be. But the editor is the servant of the writer. He never dictates. The editor is the reader but the reader who may not quite understand what the author is saying. The author has to trust the editor to represent his audience. The editor may want more differentiation between characters’ voices. The editor may warn about the domination of the author’s voice at the expense of his characters’ individuality The editor wants the pace to be exciting or gentle when these moods are relevant. The editor wants the ending to be totally satisfying even if that means it has to be open-ended. But these wishes are not for the editor’s gratification, they are for the author and his reader. The author must feel when that final draft goes for copy editing that he has done what he set out to do. If he wanted to make the reader laugh, or cry, feel compassion, feel excitement, has he done everything he can to achieve it? The editor is there to remind him that he will only be writing this particular book once. The editor is there so that the writer can explore thoughts and feelings and ideas, some of which are only implicit in that first draft. It is then the author’s absolute, inalienable right to decide which ideas of his own, which editorial suggestions to follow, which to ignore. Sometimes one can help a writer take a short story and turn it into a novel, which happened with Robert Westall’s prizewinning Gulf, inspired by his horror at the 1991 first Gulf War and the exploitation of boy soldiers in Iraq. Only Bob could have transformed his story into a novel about brotherly love, about those who are too sensitive to others’ pain.

I know editors are awfully presumptuous. However carefully I read, however many times, I know I can miss the point or ask for the wrong change. When editing Robert Westall’s Falling into Glory I said that the parents of Robbie, the schoolboy hero, rugger player, who falls in love with his Latin teacher, seem to turn a blind eye to what is happening in his life. Bob said that I may have had a life where parents were close to their children but not every child is in that category. Presumptuous, too, because which one of us can write at all, let alone write as well as our authors? Which one of us can write a book that the reader will remember into adulthood and make childhood more tolerable or more fun?

The breath of life

Editors are rarely writers; the exception is the glorious American novelist William Maxwell, originally literary editor of the New Yorker, whose correspondence with his prolific contributor Frank O’Connor was published in 1966 as The Happiness of Getting It Down Right. One hopes that is every editor and author’s experience. William Maxwell’s So Long See You Tomorrow won the American Book Award. He did not mind about sales ‘Why should I let best seller lists spoil a happy life.’ Writing about editing he said what should be inscribed above every editor’s desk – ‘I tried to work so slightly on the manuscript that 10 years later the writer would read his story and not be aware that anybody was involved but him.’ When he became a novelist he said, ‘I came, as a result of being an editor, to look for whatever was unnecessary in my own writing. After 40 years, what I came to care about most was not style but the breath of life.’ That is surely the prime concern of the editor, too. When necessary prescribe the breath of life.

Always, whatever the first draft looks like, whether it is by a first time writer or a Carnegie winner, the editor has faith in the writer. The editor should always begin by praising the good then the dialogue begins. The aim is to make the good even better and eliminate the blemishes. A writer does not always know where his writing is coming from, where his characters are going. I never cease to be in awe not only of my authors’ achievements, but also of the creative process of writing. It is presumptuous but that is the editor’s role, to see as reader not author, where it is all leading. The editor is there to encourage a bold idea and give the writer the confidence to write about every subject under the sun. I am lucky to have edited authors whose view of children’s books is visionary. As Carlo Gebler, in an interview on the publication of August 44 has said: ‘It also should be borne in mind we all have this wonderful (God given?) tool which is in us in order that we can find out about that which isn’t in our experience, namely the imagination. It’s there to allow us to see worlds we haven’t known and is a critical part of what makes us human and, incidentally, is critical to our adaptation and success as a species.’

The only condition an editor should impose is to remind the author that he is writing for children, who deserve to keep a belief in good defeating evil. But that does not mean the story can defy reality. The editor is there to make sure the writer’s voice, his very self, is in every word of every book and there to listen to, every time we open a page on first reading or rereading years later. The editor’s purpose is to make sure that the voice continues to speak even when the real world has changed and the writer is dead.

Nothing to do with a six figure advance

The editor is sometimes privileged, although I suspect it is a rare occurrence now, to live many years with a writer’s work. Speaking as an editor who has edited Jenny Nimmo and Jamila Gavin for twenty years, Annie Dalton for fifteen, that long journey together, that long dialogue, is how trust is created and how the editor proves the publisher’s faith that the early promise will be fulfilled, however long that takes, and the author will some day write the prize winning and best selling book. May I digress here to tell you that many years ago the agent Gina Pollinger spotted the brilliance of two short stories by J M Koetze sent as unsolicited manuscripts and Murray Pollinger suggested she send them to my brother Tom Rosenthal at Secker. Last week Koetze was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature. A good editor-author relationship has nothing to do with a six figure advance.

Children’s books are at last being recognised as they have always deserved to be. Last year’s winner of this award, Philip Pullman, has blazed a trail which can only encourage others.To read The Times Wednesday book section recently and see a review of Martin Amis’ new novel and, on the facing page, one of David Almond’s wonderful The Fire-Eaters, without a dividing ‘children’s fiction’ label is what my generation of editors never thought would happen. Eleanor Farjeon would also be delighted.

This is a shortened version of Miriam Hodgson’s Eleanor Farjeon Award acceptance speech delivered on 7 October 2003. It is published by kind permission of the Children’s Book Circle.