It is possible, from my frequent descriptions of job activities where I work, that readers might get the idea that we editors do pretty much nothing but attend birthdays and other parties and indulge in pizza and ice cream. This is not entirely true, of course. Our job can actually get quite hectic and stressful, particularly when moving all those commas around in a manuscript, which is, as most people suspect, the main job of editors (the other being to act as a thorn in the side of authors). According to the National Editorial and Publication Board rules, commas cannot make up more than 7.3% of a manuscript; any excess must be dealt with severely by being turned into quotation marks.
Many of us also have to do tough projects like interview people for our journal, people who write adorable children's picture books for a living. This is tough because although authors of picture books rarely use commas in their writing, they use A LOT while speaking, and naturally we have to edit most of them out when transcribing the conversation.
I recently undertook such an interview. For privacy's sake, and because it is a fun name, I will call the author I interviewed Penelope. Penelope writes mostly nonfiction picture books on nature and the wild--animals, vegetables, men surviving while their wives are gone for a week, etc. She writes in very simple yet fun language, mostly without commas.
Penelope let me know that she would not have a problem keeping up her end of the conversation about books or her work and did I want her to stick to the questions I would send ahead of time or would it be okay if she went astray from the topic now and then, because she sort of had a tendency to do that?
I assured her that straying was encouraged. "Oh, good," she said. "I hate on TV and radio when you have to stick to the prescribed questions and a time table and all that."
I asked Penelope, who holds a degree in biology, about some of the adventures she and her plant-expert husband have had during their wide-ranging travels.
"Well, we were in Panama on the trail of these ants and another woman was sick and I stayed in her tent with her and all of a sudden a bunch of monkeys appeared and I could also see vultures in the air -- I'd been trying to write a book about vultures for a long time and just couldn't find the right hook -- and I had to decide whether to grab my camera and microphone to record the monkeys or my notebook to scribble down all the words that were suddenly coming to me to describe the vultures' flight...I wasn't sure WHAT to do!"
I hate when you have to make choices like that.
What had made her decide to apply her scientific skills to writing for children?
"Well, it turns out that kids are interested in what I'm interested in--animals, birds, insects, clouds..."
Vultures, too?
"Kids LOVE the vulture book. Even girls."
Penelope had an ear for language from a very young age, as evidenced by a recording her father made when she was a toddler, doing perfect mimics of her sister's and dad's voices.
"Plus, I read a LOT when I was young," she said. "Mostly in the car while waiting for my mom and my sister at some appointment or errand."
She sounded like my kind of kid.
Penelope talked animatedly for about an hour, describing her love of language and her discussions with kids and her naturalistic experiments in the wild. Several times she said, "Oh, you don't want me to go there" in response to a question. "I could talk about that FOREVER. Like, when I was writing my book about sharks, if you had sat next to me on a plane, I would have only wanted to talk to you about sharks the whole flight."
We started to wind down several times, then I would ask if she had anything else she wanted to say. She did. "Well, you could have sent me a few email questions," she joked, "but no, YOU wanted to talk on the phone."
Near the end of our conversation she begged me to make her sound good in the journal article. "Or, at least make me sound sane," she said.
"That's what we editors do best," I said. Other than commas.
"Oh, I LOVE editors," she said. "Editors are really like fairy godmothers. You know, you should really buy a wand and keep it at your desk. To remind you."
And THAT is the kind of author that keeps us editors doing what we do, even if everyone else thinks we only push around some commas.
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