Behind the Editor’s Desk

Secrecy and pretense have been a part of music education since at least the Middle Ages. Cliques have had their own notation. Masters have been reluctant to share their techniques for fear that they would lose their competitive edge. Textbooks were written in an overwrought, highfalutin academic style, perhaps to create a sense of awe and mystique around the author. But that doesn’t do the reader/student much good. I hope that we’re growing out of that now, in this age of sharing information.

You’ll see this if you compare several works discussing the same subject matter. At NEC, we had a seminar devoted to this. We looked a counterpoint and harmony books by Schoenberg, Piston, and some others, and compared their styles. Some were clear and helpful. Others were as dense as mortgage documents. But the ideas were the same. A fugue is a fugue. Why then, not compete for the clearest explanation? The reality of what’s published is far from that.

In my editing, I find that some authors put a lot of effort into putting on such airs and trappings of academia. This is especially common in two groups: highly educated musicians born before about 1950 and people who grew up very poor, in rough or highly rural neighborhoods with poor schools. The result is long rambling sentences, awkward and esoteric words, and a condescending affect.

Yuck. Clarity is so much more helpful to the reader.

So, the laborious process goes, of profound, deep editing. When editing gets severe, an unfortunate consequence can be that the writer’s personality can get lost. This is a danger with all writing that is very far from the mark of what’s appropriate or helpful for the reader. The life gets edited out of it. The baby goes out with the bath water, and it can be tough work getting it back in.

Which brings me to the Westminster dog show. Congratulations to Uno the beagle and all those who played a part in awarding him his Best in Show victory on February 11, 2008. As I am part of a two-beagle household, with my beagle in-law making three, this is big news around here, and I will confess to probably spending too much time reading about this grand event. A beagle hasn’t won Best in Show before.

Particularly of note are some of the details regarding Uno’s performance. Not only was he considered the noisiest in show, but he also reportedly nibbled on a brand new sign and nipped a microphone during an interview. This is important news: it means that he is a proper beagle, not some over-groomed robot dog, bred for chasing ribbons rather than rabbits. Uno is a dog’s dog. I will tell you from experience: real beagles destroy furniture and toys, bark and howl, and lick even clean dishes in the dishwasher. They are like Uno.

Uno had a good bath, and likely a pedicure, and was on his best behavior for the show. But he was still Uno the beagle. The result was that the crowd gave him an uncharacteristically enthusiastic standing ovation. Despite being on his best behavior, he was still himself. That’s what won the day. He was the perfect dog. And he was still a beagle.

As writers and editors, let’s take note. There are many ways to present concepts. Truth and clarity are our ideals. But the human element—in Uno’s case, the “beagle factor”—that makes it unique and fosters an emotional tie with the reader.

I am reminded of a project by a highly beloved educator, who was just a terrible writer. In his first draft, he came across as condescending and rambling, and inclined towards useless information, redundancy, and digressions. It was such an obnoxious first proof.

After four years editing his project, which included two different editors who eventually gave up in disgust, the project landed on my desk, and I had the directive to either save it or kill it. I had seen the first draft and knew how it started. Then, I read the latest edited version, and saw that it had become a lifeless lump. It was utterly without any beagle factor left. Mostly inoffensive, but b-o-r-i-n-g. And it was about two hundred pages too long.

I met with the author and found him to be extremely charismatic and engaging, in person. He was also really, really smart, and kind, and seemed to care that I understood the concepts he was explaining to me. And he was sooooo funny! If he was a dog, he’d be a beagle, and his overly edited manuscript was a pale reflection of himself. Who knows why his writing was so off, but the editing mostly moved it sideways, rather than up. The grammar was cleaned up, and the offensive bits were removed. But, well, yuck again.

Here’s how we saved it.

I went through the book, chapter by chapter, and came up with lists of questions about the content. When there was a concept missing, I formed a question to generate the right answer about it. When something was boring, I’d ask for an example. When something was condescending, I’d ask him to explain it again. He was so fed up with the project at that point that he didn’t really remember much about what was in the manuscript and what was not.

Rather than asking him to write again, I interviewed him, doing a one-hour session per chapter, based on my lists of questions.

In these interviews, he was his usual charming self. He told jokes and stories, he used time-tested teaching strategies to explain difficult theoretical concepts. He swore like a sailor, as was his wont. He’d go off on tangents, but then the questions would bring him back. They were delightful sessions because he was such a fun person. To him, it was really a process of chatting about a subject that he loved, rather than writing a book.

I transcribed these interviews, and used what he said there to fill in or replace what was in the original chapters. Some of his stories were really not appropriate for print, but others became useful metaphors/examples, especially after some gentle modifications. Some of them wound up exemplifying points that were besides what originally prompted them, but they were still his stories. In other words, we captured his “schtick.” I gave him the chapters, which he felt were in his own voice in a way that his own actual writing never was, and he made small technical adjustments, but overall was very happy with how it turned out.

The result was a clear, concise book that is now getting glowing reviews. People comment how they like his warm style, and feel like he’s right in the room with them. His past students commented that they were so happy to have his teaching in book form. He went back into his book, and it became alive again. The book is clear and informative, but it’s also got that beagle factor.

There are many ways that writing can be good. If publishing is your goal, remember the importance of the beagle factor. On this eve of Valentine’s Day, let’s remember that it’s the beagle factor that makes the difference between like and love.

Life would be easier if I had a colder heart. Take my drakes, for example. Fine fellows they are: young, handsome, friendly Indian runner ducks. But in spring, when their hormones start to flow, they will be too intense for my poor hen ducks. If I keep the flock intact, well, not everyone will survive the unwholesome mad frolics that would occur in the pond. One drake for three ducks is the recommended ratio, and I’ve got nearly four for six.

So, I’ve got an issue to address. And much as I like duck a l’orange, I wasn’t brought up in a slaughter house.

Another issue is my chickens, though I’m a couple years from having to address that. Chickens lay eggs for two or three years. Then, real farmers relocate them to the closest stew pot. The alternative is to keep them around, and run an old age home for chickens. If you want more eggs after that, you need to get more chicks.

Unless you can do the dark deed, you can wind up with an infinite number of chickens. And unless you can do it with inappropriate book proposals, well, it’s an impossible business model for a publisher.

Summertime is when teachers often have time available to write books, and the end of summer seems to be the most intense time for them to send book proposals to publishers. Last August, I was really getting inundated.

Then a deadline for proofreading something was looming, and so I switched gears to become just a proofreading machine for a few days, and tried not to get distracted by anything else. When I came up for air, it was time to devote a couple hours to the odious task of rejecting manuscripts.

In my job, there is practically nothing I hate more than rejecting manuscripts. Crushing dreams. Well, not only. The ones I actually feel sad about are in the minority. Like, we once received a beautifully prepared manuscript submitted for a book about how to play the didjeridoo. In all honesty, I think it would have been among the best books published on that topic. But we are ill prepared to market something like that. Our house brand is more about contemporary popular music, jazz, production, making a career, and so on. It just wasn’t a good fit, so we had to pass. A different publisher would have been more optimized to sell it to the appropriate channels. I sincerely hope the author found someone and that her book did well.

[Note: it wasn't really about the didjeridoo. The only lying I plan to do on this blog is to change details to protect the innocent. So, a didjeridoo proposal last summer by a little old lady in Kentucky might have actually been a harmonica proposal five years ago by a pimply teen-ager in Canada.]

Anyhow, most of my butchering doesn’t require so much soul searching, and my loathing of the task often has more to do with the self-absorbed rudeness so commonly part of the person submitting it. (I’m talking non-Berklee types here. It’s completely appropriate for any Berklee faculty member to propose any idea to me, including lunch. But our Web site states clearly, “We publish products by faculty members at Berklee…”)

For example, random people around the world send me scores of atonal chamber music. I happen to like atonal chamber music, and have written some of it myself. But if the author had spent two seconds to look at our Web site or catalog, they would have seen that such publications are simply not what we do. I have to take the time to open their Byzantine packaging, figure out what they are suggesting, and then send them a response. And what they are suggesting is effectively that we make a foolish business decision that would waste tens of thousands of dollars in production and marketing, if we had made the wrong choice and published their hideous cacophony.

I’m reminded of one of the funniest portions of any of our books, a passage in George Howard’s book Getting Signed, where he describes himself listening to demos, wrangling with duct-taped packaging, while the phone is ringing off the hook, and he’s desperately trying to eat some sort of lunch. (Check out George’s excellent blog.) I totally relate. Reviewing book proposals is very similar.

Maybe, I can process a wildly inappropriate proposal in ten minutes (minimum), from opening the envelope to sending the polite declination, and fulfilling some additional administration associated with it. Judging the wildly inappropriate project itself might just take two seconds. It’s the rest of it that’s time consuming.

What a waste. I particularly hate it when people I’ve never heard of overnight inappropriate proposals to me. Sometimes, such packages come from overseas. How much does that package cost them? $50 perhaps, including photocopying and CD, but not including their time? And are they shotgunning many publishers with the same inappropriate proposals? A tiny bit of research would save a lot of money.

One good thing, though, about butchering day: it makes me feel better about the mounds of rejection letters that I’ve amassed myself, of my own work. These rejections aren’t personal. They are rejections of the proposed business collaboration, which would have been doomed to failure and a dreadful mistake for all concerned. Sitting on this side of the desk has really changed my own approach to getting my work published, and helped me to get more personal work in print.

Perhaps, we reject nine out of ten proposals we receive. For maybe half of those, it is immediately obvious that they will never work, so I try to drop them like hot potatoes. The criteria are clearly articulated on our Web site. We publish instructional works by our faculty members, and any exceptions to that rule have special stories; maybe they were guest lecturers, etc. We don’t publish chamber music arrangements. Look at our catalog! We just don’t do it! If a non-faculty member proposes that we publish their chamber music, well, it’s an obvious no. (Note that in August, I received internationally overnighted chamber music score proposals from two different people.)

Of course, the destiny of some proposals is more difficult to figure out, because they might be close to being appropriate for us. These can take several months to process, as various decision makers have to weigh in. If a proposal is so good that it actually gets accepted, it is likely that fifteen or twenty people, spread out over five committees, have weighed in on it. If it’s “close, but no cigar,” still, quite a few people might be involved in the decision. Solid proposals we reject often take more of my time than solid proposals we accept because I do my best to advocate to the other decision-makers that we publish it, despite their opinion.

But again, rejections are often due to factors that have nothing to do with the quality of the intended work. We publish about a dozen products per year. If we already have six drum products in the pipeline for this coming year and someone proposes another, chances are that it won’t fly, no matter how good an idea it is.

I think my record butchering day was about nine projects. I regretted to inform them, but you know, more than that, I regretted that some of them tried to snooker me into making bad decisions, too.

To the “close, but no cigar people,” though, I really am sorry that we couldn’t publish your work. There is just finite space and feed in this coop, and I’ve got to make some tough calls.