Working with an editor
Muse No 66 September,1987
An article written a few months after School Portrait was published.
I had imagined, when my manuscript for School Portrait was accepted in May 1985 by McPhee/Gribble for publication, that the bulk of the work was behind me.
And so, when Hilary McPhee rang to tell me that a certain Michael O'Rourke would be doing the editorial work on the book, I looked forward to this new relationship with no great sense of trepidation. It would be mildly stimulating, I felt at the time, to have someone look over my paragraphs to help me tidy things up.
Our first few letters to each other were gentle, ice-breaking affairs. I sent him chapters of a second draft, while he finalised the contract and said that, while the second draft looked fine, he'd reserve any substantial comment till after it was completed. He made a comment in one of his letters about "your excellent material and the unpretentious ease of your approach", and I was cheerfully lulled into a false sense of security.
In November, Michael sent me six closely typed pages of comment, the gist of which was that the book was still in a very raw state - that incidents, places and characters were not well evoked, and that I'd tried to justify and preach too much. Just tell your story, he urged me. "Present inter-related stories and arguments and leave readers to form their own conclusions." Vary the focus, he suggested, dwell on vivid scenes, pay more attention to how you introduce the characters.
It was all excellent advice, but, for several days, I seethed. It felt like he was tearing apart something I'd laboured long and hard over, something that had become precious to me. How dare he? What would he know about children, about schools, about education? Why didn't he say these things earlier, before I'd done all this work on the book?
Over the next couple of days, I read and re-read Michael's letter at least ten times. Each time I found more in it that challenged my thinking, that made me see new possibilities in the story.
Michael came to Canberra for a couple of days just before Christmas, and we discussed his suggestions. I tried a couple of sample paragraphs, written in more of a novelist style, with plenty of dialogue. Michael felt they worked well. I then spent six weeks re-writing the book.
I sent the third draft off in January, and waited impatiently for Michael's reaction. About six weeks later, I got a letter from him which began ominously,
'“First of all, Steve, I'd like to point out the advantages which this draft has over previous ones." I knew straight away that he had serious reservations, and a long list of them followed. The writing was undisciplined, my use of dialogue often unconvincing, and there were still paragraphs full of what he called "obscuring verbiage, verbal weeds”. “It came as a considerable shock to me," he wrote, "that parts of your second draft were better expressed."
He had plenty of suggestions. The pages of my third draft were covered in them. "These early conversations are terribly stiff and unconvincing.... Cut this - I can't see the point to it..... Try not to pussyfoot like this. Put down your thoughts boldly.... This bit is embarrassing to read, awful stuff! Cut it!"
And so on, on and on, comments on just about every one of my four hundred pages. He concluded:
"This is your first contact with nose-to-the-ground editing, and it's bound to be a shock, but be assured that many manuscripts end up looking like a battlefield before being typeset, and of course when they're finally printed, you'd never know. They seem so effortless in print, and the struggle it took by writer and editor to get them like that is never even guessed at by the reader."
Once again, as so often happened during my work with Michael, I felt, all at once, abused, attacked, undermined, challenged, supported and profoundly helped. On one level I knew that I needed these comments to bring out the best in my writing. But I also felt hurt and misunderstood, and I needed to get rid of some of these feelings before I could stand back and work more dispassionately with his suggestions. So wrote him an abusive letter, suggesting that he was incapable of understanding the most obvious points, that he was out of touch with children, that he was just trying to get some personal things off his chest. As soon as the letter was posted, I calmed down and found myself working constructively on some of his criticisms. Wisely, he ignored my outburst but instead continued to comment on what I sent him.
There was a further problem which Michael insisted I had to tackle - the book had grown too long. He suggested I go through the whole manuscript, cutting out whatever was not essential, and working to express everything as concisely as possible. “This time the scalpel, next time the cleaver."
And so I began work on another draft. I loved this part of the writing. I felt a tremendous satisfaction in finding new and concise and fresh ways of expressing myself.
One morning, when I'd finished the revising, I sat down and, for the first time in over a year, read the whole book from start to finish. I found myself being carried along by the narrative, drawn into the scenes, reliving the episodes. I felt excited and proud.
Michael left McPhee/Gribble before School Portrait was published, but he wrote to me soon afterwards to tell me how much he'd enjoyed reading the final product.
His approval was important to me. Our work together, though sometimes stormy, was amongst the most stimulating and rewarding I've done in my professional life. It led me to think again about rigour and the pursuit of excellence, qualities which seem to me to be part of, and not opposed to, the philosophy of child-centred learning.