everyone wants to write a book & on becoming an editor

everyone wants to write a book

You’ve read my books before. You’ve dog-eared the pages of the biographies, poems, and fiction that you've liked. I’ve written trash that, maybe, you secretly devoured, and solemn verses that have echoed in your head long after you’ve shut the book. But why, then, haven’t you seen my name in print? 

It’s because they haven’t been published under my name. 

I’m an editor, aka a ghost writer. Because in the much-maglined, sometimes sordid, sometimes awe-inspiring profession of commercial book publishing, everything goes.

Being an editor is a tough and more importantly a...confusing job. There were times when this once-gentleman’s profession saw the well read and eloquent in society turn up, mostly pro bono, to tackle brilliant literature. The times have changed. Commercial publishing in India is churning up trash by the mountain loads. It’s all chick lit, upchucking love stories, lesbian stories, spin offs of the man-who-killed-literature’s (read C. Bhagat) plots. It’s gloom and doom like...bring it, Noah. And if you’re in the book business you’ll understand where I’m coming from.

Firstly, everyone wants to write a book. The number of unsolicited manuscripts that arrive, EVERY day, at a publishing house is proof itself. And most of what comes in is abominable, worse than a cat's sick. Here’s an extract from an introduction letter to a book proposal that I’ve saved:

Revered Sir,

This unveiling composition most loyally suffices to be one of the most prime and mythical endeavours of mine that have been clandestinely consecrated to my empathetic bosom. Plausibly thus, I christened it ‘In Love’ and I must herald it with all conceivable accords on my unassuming elements that I have endeavoured my paramount superlative to realise this conspicuous marvel that is quintessentially a heart-wringing yarn of the last seven and a half years of my otherwise hushed verses.

Sire [!!], my poignant oeuvre is saliently pivoted about two girls, and is thus least like all others that your esteemed acumens would have taken a savour to. It is idiosyncratically an accolade to their effusive sensations and manifests the most ardent of all cherubic ranks....

...I would duly appreciate your nobility if you could please go through the overture to the novel and channel me to realise this beautiful reverie of mine...

Anticipating esprit de corps from you.

And I kid you not - I would like to add.

Back in the day, my first at a publishing house, we’d go through the ritual of sieving through the heaps of unsolicited manuscripts every Friday. Congregating around our small and wobbly lunch table with tea and munchies for half an hour, we, the harried and overworked editors, would play god. Looking back, I’d say that was our finest thirty minutes of the week. We’d reject proposals on many factors but the first and most important being grammar and typo. If the ‘policemen was going to surrond the building yesterday night’ then think of what’s in store for us tomorrow.

Any...I'm going to say 'hoo'. Fuck off, random heckler.

But then there were books that the publisher thinks will sell. These were generally the worst and we would cry, hurl abuses through every sentence, or just be stupefied at its insult to literature. The authors to these books were also generally the insufferable type. Convinced about his/her’s work as the defining moment in literature, they’d gloat and be condescending and expect us to ghost-write major parts of the book. I swear to you I’ve written a collection of twenty poems from scratch for a bureaucrat who one day woke up and thought she was a poet and wanted to see ‘her’ collection of poetry in print.

So the thing was that I was quite done with cleaning up other people’s characters, plots and excessive comma usage (my respect for e e cummings stems from there). I thought I had it in me to come up with my own book. I wanted my characters to speak for themselves. But when I sat down to do the job I realised that Daniel in the den of lions had it easier. 

Writing a book is great effort as it is but when an editor takes to writing a book it’s a whole different ball game. It’s you against yourself. You know what sells and you don’t want to go down that path. You know good literature and you fear you might slip into imitation if you’re not being careful. You want fresh prose that rings true of life and that is the most difficult part. 

The critic in me needed to die, at least till I got to page fifty of my book. But like they say, old habits are loyal friends. I sat and cursed the day I turned editor.   

on becoming an editor

A major in English literature is a tricky and courageous choice. It’s all lofty and intellectual and slots you in with the arty-farty lot but its critical approach can have long-lasting effects on ones worldview. After three years of critical theory in college, I was flung out mercilessly into the dog-eat-d without any concrete skills that I could make a career of, and found myself deconstructing everything from relationships to pancakes. I did give the masters programme the obligatory consideration but promptly slunk away into the shadows when I saw the bombastic list of books that awaited me. The very thought of another Marxist, Brecht-adoring professor was enough to turn my bowels inside out. Plus, I was done with education as we have it here. During my interregnum, my parents hollered ‘journalism’ from the rooftops hoping that I’d hear their call. But the new electronica music I was listening to drowned them out with its aggressive and schizophrenic beats. Gradually, they gave up and their call to journalism gave into gravity and probably got caught in the crisscross of washing lines far below. That left me completely to my own devices. 

It’s when you have nothing to do that you begin to understand and appreciate the business of life. It’s an infernally bustling life and sleep is that only momentary brake.

There I was, a mere graduate with a blank resume, Yeats sitting effortlessly on my tongue, with not the foggiest clue about what I was supposed to do. To make matters more complicated, all my flatmates and friends had moved to different cities/countries following their dreams. Don’t get me wrong here. It’s not like I didn’t have dreams. The problem was that I had one dream too many. I had this idea of my ‘best self’ - that I’d be an assistant to a curator in Rome, but the idea of slumming it out for a few years seemed impossible. I didn’t act out on my dreams and continued to dwell as a lazy daydreamer would. With my flatmates gone, I stumbled about for a bit, my bags faithfully trailing behind me, till a dear friend took me into her one-room apartment. She’d finished with her masters (in literature) and was soon to join a publishing house. She had me at 'I have a fold-out'.

I gave away most of my things as I didn’t want to crowd her miniscule barsati, and settled in. When my friend and I look back at the apartment we are always wonderstruck as to how we did it. Let me give you a visual of the place. I couldn’t do a pirouette in there. That’s how small it was. And, when the hellish winds, just before the monsoons, roared through the city, spitting dust everywhere, the doors of the tiny flat would shudder and shake with such force that I’d have serious doubts that the walls would be where they were when the storm subsided. The two upsides to the place were that my friend was a fantastic cook and, god bless her soul, fed me some of the best meals, and that it had a vast terrace where I had set up my easel and where I would paint, earnestly, till the sun dipped behind the buildings.

It’s not that I wasn’t looking out for a job but it so happened that the very day I went out job hunting there would magically be a great thunderstorm and me caught in it. Every time it happened I’d come back looking like a scraggly cat that had been mercilessly thrown into the washing machine by a demon child, with all the merits on my resume symbolically washed away by the rain. I’d be dismayed at my luck and convinced with each passing day that I was doomed to be a struggling artist and down and out forever.

The months passed and I grew quieter and sunburnt from staying out on the terrace too long. Then one day after dinner my friend thrust a manuscript into my hands. ‘Read and edit,’ she said. Her otherwise gentle tone, for that brief moment, was tinged with authority. We had grown close in the past months and I think she saw the desperate and disillusioned person I was quickly turning into through my laidback demeanour. I obeyed. With a list of proofreading symbols in hand, I read and edited like a person possessed. Work has a sweetness I cannot describe. It disciplines the brain and converts otherwise random thoughts into rational coherence. It’s as simple as that.          

           

After I was done, she recommended me to a production manager of a two-bit publishing house for educational books. And in a week I was walking through the serpentine alleys of the old city with three manuscripts to proofread in my bag. I was so thrilled that I treated myself to a lunch (that I could just barely afford) at that much-loved culinary institution bang next to the sweeping Jama Masjid. And in another four months I was assistant editor at a publishing house.

I didn’t realise then that in the very act of becoming an editor I would become my worst critic and construct a block so large that years later I’d find myself scrambling around it, trying to undo, or rather, go back to a time when my mind was free to conjure up an untainted thought. Free from my own criticism.

I need desperately to think like a person who has a story to tell instead of weighing every sentence. I needed to shake the curse of the editor even though I know it’s good to edit as one writes. I’m now working on seeing light beyond the crummy block, and if I do, then I know that page fifty won’t be too far along.