A between-seasons note on "authorship"
I recently read Christian Lorentzen’s piece in Granta on corporate publishing and especially Dan Sinykin’s book Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature. [Link to Granta piece on their website, title: Literature Without Literature] I find Lorentzen generally to be a sharp thinker who, thank god, actually has a considered opinion on things he writes about. There’s plenty in this piece that piqued my interest and plenty which resonated, but I think he takes a major swing and miss in one place, which is the degree to which an author is the sole architect of their work.
Throughout, there is a sentiment that editors and agents, have very little to do with actual Literary Production. This is a brief note so rather than recapping all instances of this, I will quote the most to-the-point instance of this strain:
“Whereas creative-writing programs and the MFA system generally can reasonably be thought of as a site of literary production – places where novels are written and environments that in some ways shape the books written in their confines – the publishing industry is in fact the first stage of literary consumption. Unlike, say, the series of Star Trek novels published by Pocket Books in the 1980s and 90s, literary books are not the brainchild of publishing houses. Agents typically represent clients who have already written their manuscripts and editors purchase the rights to publish those manuscripts, a process that involves putting covers on the books, sending advance copies to reviewers, advertising campaigns, and so on (the hypnotic effects of TikTok being the current industry obsession). The work that agents and editors do on literary novels is more akin to tree trimming than tree planting.”
Now, I cannot speak for every agent/cy and I cannot speak for every editor at every publishing house so let’s just get that out of the way. But I do have a fair amount of experience working on books in my own professional capacity, which includes a lot of curtains-back on how both agencies and editors can (and by ‘can’ I do not mean ‘always do’) shape books. I think it’s borderline for someone as smart as Lorentzen to fall into the trap of the lone genius author, toiling away on his little manuscripts, before an agent and publishing house come around slap a title and cover on it and send it out the door.
In my experience, this resembles the process of publishing very little. Agencies can (ibid) do an extensive amount of work with an author on their book before it gets even a hint of attention from publishers. Agencies can (ibid) structure or restructure an entire book, for example, can cut or invent characters, can change the ending, the beginning and the middle. Sure, agencies typically do not take on projects that would require a huge mountain of work because that is often an indication either the project or author is undercooked at that time –– and will turn down or rebuff such projects even from established voices.1 And yes, sometimes there are authors who are able to much more easily get materials together on their own –– although even in this case agencies can (ibid) still make changes to turn good into great, which does matter when you’re in the business of selling books to publishers, at least sometimes.
For their part editors can (ibid) architect extensive changes to books. Sure, sometimes a book needs very little changes and edits are relatively minor, but relatively minor does not necessarily mean negligible. Nor does that mean that’s always what happens. I’ve seen manuscripts flat-out rejected and sent off for breaking in half and putting back together. I’ve seen line edits where editors have a close hand in shaping how things unfold on the micro level. I’ve seen multi-page editorial letters that essentially amount to telling authors they have core problems, paradoxes or faults in their book which yes, an editor noticed and yes, an editor wants them to get their shit together, sorry I mean, fix it. All of these things can (ibid) happen.
This is, of course, not always the case, as I have already caveated. The faster a book is published the less work probably has gone into it. The more formulaic a book is the more likely it is that less detailed work needs to be done. The bar is also not the same at every imprint, with every author, with every agent, and for every slice of readership. And so on.
If we are going to use some sort of garden metaphor for the role of agents and editors in the authorship of books, I would say it’s more like this: An author has a plot of land that they’ve sketched a design for a garden onto. Agents and editors may do as little as suggest small changes such as replacing a straight path with a curve, replacing trees with bushes and varying flower types. Or they may do something as big as changing the dimensions of the plot, adding a water feature and and handing it back for planting, before getting back another version which they further weed, prune, add a deck to and get rid of not one, not two, but three pizza ovens.
Interestingly to me, this piece was published shortly after a twitter discussion wherein critics, readers, and those working in publishing gathered in a small circle to lament the fact that editorial work has languished in the last stretch of time due to the mismanagement of publishing houses which has led to the proverbial “nights and weekends” job of an editor as being to actually edit books, while their workdays are taken up with project management, coordination between departments, attempting to pick up slack left by understaffing and overwhelm in marketing/PR/other departments publishers actually do need to pay more attention to if they want editors to actually edit.
This to me is not a case-in-point for Lorentzen but rather a case-in-point for me (convenient, no, as it’s appearing in my newsletter?) which is that people do notice when a book is poorly edited and there is certainly –– and should be –– a difference between a draft an author might turn in to their editor and what gets printed after editing. Meaning, editors are shaping books. I think there are some very well-edited books being released today as well as bad ones, and also that if right now publishing houses are serving littler and littler editorial function that is an indictment of how publishing may be affected when run by multi-national conglomerates for whom a billion dollars in profit somehow isn’t enough.* I don’t think that’s indicative of how editorial functions have to work, nor do I even think it’s necessarily indicative of the relationship between agents, editors and any of the individual authors Lorentzen named, especially as several of them pre-date the worst of conglomerate publishing that we’re seeing today.
*(Though not having read McGurl or Sinykin I can’t comment on the substance of their other arguments; I generally find Lorentzen to be persuasive in his points for the rest of this piece.)
Unfortunately for questions of authorship, some avenues of literary study and so on, it’s likely that the only way to tell the extent of an agent or editor’s shaping of a book unfortunately is either to have preserved archival materials from all parties, to pursue firsthand accounts, or to be part of the process of publishing those books. I have personally spoken with authors who have been frustrated that their agents did not do enough editorial work with them, or who wanted to receive more attention from editors, and praise for the opposite. I have also run into professional and lay instances of the wallpaper peeling away to show authors pushing back at edits and demanding to keep certain facets of a book, which if nothing else proves editors do ask for significant changes. (When these elements have been kept in I sometimes find private and/or public agreement that the work would have been better had the author not spent a ton of chips to stop an editor from doing their job.) On the other hand, from firsthand accounts I know that the most famous book from a well-known author was extensively shaped, edited and made legible by the author’s agent, for example. This information certainly does not appear anywhere on the book itself nor in the mainstream discussion of the book. Editors and agents, after all, benefit in many ways from feeding into the general public’s idea that authors are lone riders slinging sweet, sweet prose alone in their rooms. It is authors who show up at book festivals, authors whose signatures matter, authors who readers look for on spines in the library or at the bookstore. We’ve barley been able to get translators onto covers, much less been transparent about how much teeth-pulling and revision can (ibid) happen behind the scenes from agents, editors and others who the author may give their work to outside of a formal publishing apparatus. Nobody’s ever heard of a celebrity editor, and if they think they have they actually pay far more attention to publishing and publications than 99% of the population, no matter what Jude Law movies have to say about it. Ironically, in critiquing the so-called market logic of Sinykin and McGurl etc. it seems Lorentzen has found himself square in another marketing trap, albeit one that has been going on for longer than conglomerate publishing itself.
Hello it’s still not season 6 I guess. Anyway I’m on vacation right now, don’t bother me. I didn’t proofread. And I didn’t work very hard on this but I still believe I’m right. Brat summer????????????
I LIED bother me for one reason and one reason only: do you prefer a link just as a URL https://granta.com/literature-without-literature/ or like I did above in brackets Link to Granta piece on their website, title: Literature Without Literature ? Still trying to figure out better and better linking so you have all the information you need to make a decision as soon as a link is relevant AND there is nothing hidden or in any way vague about where you’re going. Thank you to everyone who has responded to my link questions in the past I see and respect you, you personally, and I would like to shake your hand.
If you're an author, I personally think you should want an agent who will honestly tell you if a book is undercooked and/or doesn't have legs. Or else why work with them? ↩