The Guide on the Side
I met a fascinating man on a plane recently. He was a university professor on his way to a meeting where he was going to get further funding for a study his department was doing about a style of teaching called "The Guide on the Side." If you're not familiar with teaching lingo, "Guide on the Side" is pretty much the antonym of "Sage on the Stage." When I was a teacher, it was the way I liked to teach: not as an expert, but as a more experienced person whose job was to lead learners to understanding.
Editing is like that, too. I am really not an expert at anything, and I'm far less knowledgeable than my authors. But I do know where we're trying to go with their material, and I'd like to think that I know what makes books good--from experience, from intuition, and from sheer love of the things. So like a good sherpa, I take some of the burden, and we attempt to ascend the mountain together. The path is not always easy, sometimes we have to bushwhack, sometimes we have to belay each other. But through planning, careful work and good communication, we make it.
There are so many good metaphors abut the writing process, in Annie Lamott's wonderful Bird by Bird, for instance, or in the E.L. Doctorow quote "Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." Sometimes on our trek we are in the fog: about the market for the book we are trying to create, about how closely we've been able to get the words to convey the author's meaning, about each other.
This is where faith comes in. We maintain our belief in the writing, our belief that it deserves to see hard--or soft--covers. And we keep moving forward, persevering through the normal challenges on any book's unique path to publication, until we reach the summit and plant the flag with the ISBN number. And that is always a heady, victorious feeling, no matter how many books you have written or edited.
For the guide on the side or for the author, publishing is not easy work, and it is never as glamorous as aspiring writers imagine. It can be demanding and tedious. But I will tell you a secret: The published book, the conference room full of beautiful volumes, the warehouse with cartons of wonderful books, even the stack on the front bookstore table are all perks, sidebars to the real story. The joy is in the journey.
When I was guiding writing students, there was a poem I loved to share. It is by a lady named Marge Piercy, and it is published in book filled with amazing poems called Poetspeak. Talking to the professor brought it to mind, and I am intrigued by how it applies as much to published authors as it does to aspiring ones.
For the Young Who Want To
Talent is what they say
you have after the novel
is published and favorably
reviewed. Beforehand what
you have is a tedious
delusion, a hobby like knitting.
Work is what you have done
after the play is produced
and the audience claps.
Before that friends keep asking
when you are planning to go
out and get a job.
Genius is what they know you
had after the third volume
of remarkable poems. Earlier
they accuse you of withdrawing,
ask why you don't have a baby,
call you a bum.
The reason people want M.F.A.'s
take workshops with fancy names
when all you can really learn is a few techniques,
typing instructions and some-
body else's mannerisms
is that every artist lacks
a license to hang on the wall
like your optician, your vet
proving that you may be a clumsy sadist
whose fillings fall into the stew
but you're a certified dentist.
The real writer is one
who really writes. Talent
is an invention like phlogiston
after the fact of fire.
Work is its own cure. You have to
like it better than being loved.
So I guide, from the side, and as I travel with these authors, they teach me about what fire really is.
Nil sine magno labore.
~Horace
