Usable and Sing a Song of Six Birds
Guest writer: Isabel Anders
“Editing and writing walk together, and they both require the eye and the ear.” —Found in the New Yorker (3/27/23).
It never failed. Every time I typed my name, Isabel, the spell-check function on my old computer would change it to “usable.” I laughed; but there was a kind of logic to it.
Eventually, it accepted my name as a valid entry rather than a typo. If you stick around long enough, you get written into the story.
“Editors and their input are inconspicuous by design. … Editors work in service of their authors and are the invisible shepherds (or packhorses or midwives, pick your metaphor) of the books we read,” wrote Sara B. Franklin.
My primary vocation as an editor has suited me perfectly—requiring accuracy, diligence, solitude—and allowing a degree of independence as one works on a manuscript. If only life were like that—a page spread out with identifiable bumps (errors) and cracks (omissions) that could, at one time, be “fixed” by an editorial pencil—but now succumb to the electronic delete key that wipes away mistakes completely.
An editor’s work actually should be invisible, causing a piece to read and flow as though it had been written that way from the beginning. Injecting one’s own personal style is not the function of a responsible editor who serves the work.
Since I wrote books myself as well, on the side, I truly appreciated other editors who performed that usable function for me—because “everyone needs an editor.”
Perhaps workers in any helping profession can easily relate to this need for focus: “Attention,” the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist writes, “is a moral act: It creates, brings aspects of things into being.” Those of us who are usable in some way are privileged to have a hand (though often an invisible one) in the process.
“Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might” in this life, we’re told in Ecclesiastes 9:10. It’s likely when the scroll of life’s story rolls out complete, editors will not be needed.
Isabel Anders’ forthcoming Mother Bilbee Tales is a collection of nursery rhymes and folktales with a twist that allows her editorial spirit to have a fun ride.
Sing a Song of Six Birds is now available on Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/review/create-review/?channel=glance-detail&asin=B0D53LDWQ8
Isabel Anders