Editing
What it is.
Who did it in a big way.

I am presently editing a manuscript which will - God willing - be published as a book. I've edited stuff all my professional life and during twelve years of retirement but I've found that most people have only a vague idea about what editing consists of. Pressed, they might suggest checking the spelling. But Microsoft Word can make a reasonable stab at that as well as serving up a mechanistic set of rules on how to write.

Here's a few things an editor does:

• Cuts out words that are unnecessary BUT adds words where the sense isn't clear.
• Cuts out words, sentences, paragraphs and even chapters where the author has succumbed to bouts of "fine writing" BUT retains passages which represent the author's "tone of voice".
• Simplifies verb forms (eg, changes "was in the habit of doing" to "did".).
• Uses commas rationally.
• Uses capital letters rationally.
• Substitutes verb/adverb combinations with better chosen verbs (eg, changes "walked slowly without obvious direction" to "ambled").
• Eliminates clichés (eg, changes "over the moon" to "delighted").
• Substitutes written forms for spoken forms (eg, "in back of" (often favoured by Americans) becomes "behind").

Above are some of the better defined tasks. It's less easy to be precise about some of the others. An editor may, for instance, change the text in order to make it more vivid. He may re-order the sequence so that the sense is easier to grasp. He may be puzzled and, believing a reader would also be puzzled, flag a question to the author. He is alert to libel and to copyright concerns.

The list goes on but one thing must be obvious: authors don't necessarily like editors. An author often believes he has bared his soul (cliché). Along comes an editor and in effect highlights that soul's imperfections. All of us are protective about our souls.

Since I've also written for a living and my stuff has been edited, I know what it's like. Good editing I can just about bear. Bad editing, often done against the clock since time is the essence of publishing, is like amputation without anaesthetic. I am smaller, shrivelled.

Luckily my present author accepts some 95% of my changes with good grace. Here and there he's even complimented me on what I've done. Where he disagrees is in the subjective areas. I say I've cut a purple passage, he says he likes it and wants it reinstated. The result is usually a compromise: a mauve passage. Remember: it's his book not mine.

The question arises as to whether a web-page about editing is suitable for inclusion in a section called Leisure. My defence is that editing is probably a hundred times easier than writing and therefore it's closer to lollygagging than staring at a monitor knowing that five hundred words were due yesterday.

But there is another defence. Editors are rarely recognised. Decades ago an author submitted a manuscript that dealt with fish behaviour. It was neither rigorous enough to function as an academic work nor light enough for general consumption as a novel. An editor set to work. He encouraged the author to dramatise and to throw in some sex and terror. The manuscript was rewritten many times. The result was Jaws. Some know it was written by Peter Benchley. Nobody knows the editor's name.

To set the record straight here are two instances of the editor as hero. Neither are particularly obscure but there is no doubt about the magnitude of what they did.

FROM TEA CHEST TO PUBLICATION Probably the best-known book editor was Maxwell Perkins who worked for the American publisher Scribner. A measure of his quality is that he not only rates a biography (Max Perkins: Editor of Genius. by A Scott Berg) but is also the subject of books describing his professional work with, among others, Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway who dedicated The Old Man and the Sea to him. However, it is not his work with these two giants that best illuminates his abilities (His genius? A cliché, of course. Perhaps it might be forgiven in a book title.) but rather an author who has fallen by the wayside, Thomas Wolfe. Not to be confused with the present-day Tom Wolfe, author of Bonfire of the Vanities and The Right Stuff, but in the thirties a name many would have been familiar with.

Wolfe's first novel was Look Homeward, Angel and when Perkins first saw it the manuscript occupied a tea-chest. Just gathering the pages together in sequence was an enormous task. Thereafter Perkins managed to persuade Wolfe to cut 90,000 words - the equivalent of a full-length novel - which was difficult enough. But Wolfe loved his work so much that for every word cut he added several. Eventually the book was published, sold well over a number of years and gained critical acclaim. William Faulkner, who won a Nobel prize for literature, said Wolfe was America's greatest writer

Alas editors are rarely honoured. Details about the radical editing emerged, though not from Perkins who was remakarbly self-effacing. The suggestion was that Angel was only a success because of Perkins' contributions. The author, miffed in the way that only authors can be miffed, broke off with Scribner. Other editors - in some cases teams of editors - were subsequently faced with the task of taming even longer manuscripts. On his deathbed at thirty-eight Wolfe saw the light and paid Perkins the tribute he deserved.

POLISHING UP A MASTERPIECE The second case of heroic editing did not involve an editor but an American poet called Ezra Pound. He wrote great but difficult poems, knew most of the major names in poetry in the twenties and thirties and if he is now not as renowned as he should be it is probably because he chose to live in Italy prior to World War Two and to support Mussolini's facism.

In the twenties an even greater American poet, T. S. Eliot, had written The Waste Land ("April is the cruellest month...") but decided he needed another poet's reaction to it before he offered it for publication. He chose Pound. What Pound did to The Waste Land was astonishing: words, lines and even whole verses were cut, significant changes were suggested, the whole work was reduced by half. What remained was undeniably a masterpiece.

So fascinating are Pound's changes that a facsimile of the edited manuscript was published in book form and is now a collector's item (as the present writer, who saw the original on display at the British Museum, knows to his cost). Eliot recognised Pound's contribution in the dedication "For Ezra Pound: il miglio fabbro" (the better craftsman).

To edit, as I am doing at the moment, the biography of a travel writer is one thing. But to edit a poem takes editing to a completely different level. A heroic level, in fact.

A long way from Word's spellchecker.