Thursday 6 December 2012

In praise of editing

I'm in the process of putting together the manuscript for my third collection. Pretty much everything's written, although plenty of the poems will get further revision over the next few weeks, but it's at the stage where the individual pieces are starting to coalesce and form little clusters.

It's got me thinking about the process of editing. I have spoken to one or two poets in the past who aren't keen on the whole thing, which I can understand up to a point. It is difficult surrendering control of what you've written, even if you'll probably have done the same in submitting work to magazines, webzines, anthologies, etc, and even though you're unlikely to have to surrender ALL control.

The important thing, I suppose, is to remember that the editor must like many aspects of your work, or they wouldn't be offering to publish it. When they're suggesting changes, they're more often than not honing your strengths a little bit, making them leaner and, yes, stronger.

There's also the way in which being edited makes you consider your own work afresh, and argue for the merits of individual pieces of work. There's a tendency, especially when you first start getting published in magazines, to assume that anything that has been accepted is worth putting in a book, without much regard to how it fits with other work. A good editor will make you make the argument for each poem, sometimes for each line.

Which is all a long way of saying that I enjoy the process - I'm not sure whether that's partly because I don't routinely get feedback on poems as I'm writing them, although I do sometimes send them to friends. I like having to think that bit harder about poems that have often been sitting around for years at a time. More often than not, the collection turns into something rather different from what you first envisaged, rather in the same way poems themselves do.

5 comments:

Caroline Gill said...

I would be interested to know whether (you or) other poets feel that a poem text 'sets' (like cement perhaps, rather than jelly!) for the final time prior to book publication, or whether the 'abandonment' means that there is no such setting.

Matt Merritt said...

That's tricky, Caroline! There are some poems of mine that have appeared in my collections that I read slightly differently to how they appear, so I suppose I'd have to say that they're never totally 'set'.

On the other hand, once they're in a book MS, and edited into the shape with the help of the publisher, I do tend to stop actively worrying away at them.

Alan Baker said...

It's interesting to read this Matt, as, I've never had an 'editor' in that sense, no have I ever acted as an editor to poets I've published. But I know some people - John Lucas of Shoestring Press for example - do make editorial suggestions, even give directions to writers. I've always assumed that it's the poet's job to sort out his or her work, but, thinking about it, editing in the true sense is about collaboration, and that's often a good thing. Of course it may all depend on hos self-critical, or otherwise, a poet may be.

Alan Baker said...

It's interesting to read this Matt, as, I've never had an 'editor' in that sense, no have I ever acted as an editor to poets I've published. But I know some people - John Lucas of Shoestring Press for example - do make editorial suggestions, even give directions to writers. I've always assumed that it's the poet's job to sort out his or her work, but, thinking about it, editing in the true sense is about collaboration, and that's often a good thing. Of course it may all depend on hos self-critical, or otherwise, a poet may be.

Matt Merritt said...

I think you're right, Alan, and I think it also depends on how much outside input a poet gets earlier in the writing process, whether through workshopping, or just swapping poems online, etc.

I think the bit that I value more than anything is being made to argue for my own work, and to get clear in my own mind what I think about particular pieces. I've been lucky in that I haven't yet had a situation where an editor was dead set against a particular piece, while I was for it, but I'm sure it'll happen.