Working with authors - Sue Freestone
For any book editor, certainly for me, the best thing in the world has to be when you are invited into an author’s imagination to observe and sometimes even take part in the writing process as it happens.
When Douglas Adams (author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) rang me up and asked ‘How would you feel if you were a Norse thunder god and therefore immortal but nobody believed in you any more, and you woke up to find yourself super-glued to the floor of a warehouse in South London?’ my heart soared. As I answered ‘I think that’s one for you, Douglas’, I knew we were off on another mad, glorious, infuriating adventure. This time it was The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, perhaps his most autobiographical novel. The thing about Douglas was that when he wrote the radio scripts of Hitchhiker (they came first) he had worked with a team of people and therefore wanted the same instant feedback he had back then. That meant he could work only if I was actually there with him. He would thrash out his ideas with me then go and write a page or so and loom over me as I read them. He was six foot five and a half and very good at looming. When things went well it was the most exhilarating time in the world. When they did not it was hell, with Douglas in the pit of despair. Then my job was to tease him out of it, throwing ideas and challenges at him until he got so maddened by them he got going again with his own.
Not all writers want that degree of involvement from their editor, thank goodness. Sebastian Faulks would tell me only that he was working on a story about the First World War, nothing else at all, until he delivered Birdsong to me fully polished. Every writer is different and your job is first to try to figure out their needs and then to take care of them. First base, you have to love their writing. Without that you will get nowhere. Second, you have to be able to feel where they are going with a story, so that if they get lost, you can point them back in the right direction. Crucially, you have to be their champion in the publishing house. Sometimes, surprisingly, it gets forgotten that in trade publishing the author is the most important person. Without them there is nothing. I always try to make sure that writers feel there is a whole team there for them, from production through to sales, by introducing them to everyone. It lessens the writer’s sense of isolation and reminds us all of why we are doing what we do.
If all this sounds like hard work, it is not the job for you. If it sounds the best job in the world, then go for it, you will love it too.
