working long manuscripts (think along the lines of The Lord of the Rings). There are times when you feel like not working on a day (or two). But also, there do come times when you are so actively engaged in the book’s content that nothing would tear you apart from the lines that you scan in a trance-like state. You’d even say “no” if somebody tried to stop you for a break.For example, I was recently working on a book about child abuse and its crippling effects on a child’s psychological development into his/her adult life. The author had such captivating insight shared through so powerful and grabbing a writing style that once I got on the track to understanding how child abuse works its destructive course through a child’s life and how recovery is brought about, I found it hard to leave the computer screen. Though power failures, disruptions, and distractions of various sorts kept hindering my progress on the book, I was all into the book before working a quarter of it.
It was after I was past half of the book when I got a call from the client to leave this book and work on another assignment, which had a deadline. As if spontaneously, my reply was, “I can’t!” And I meant it. Not that I was trying to be my own boss, but I had been involved with the book on a level much deeper than professional. It was a book about souls; how they are wounded; and what it takes to heal them back to life. Not just fixing words, as I would do in proofing, but fixing lives possessed me—virtually striking my professional involvement down to release me into the broader flow of the author’s genius.
To me, as an editor, professionalism matters as a primary requisite. But experience with such books has literally trained me into multi-tasking in a way not obvious to an outside observer. Following lines in the book, I am placing in and taking out punctuation marks, highlighting grammatical errors, and suggesting improvement in diction or style. That is what comes first; but I am also a reader at the same time—one with a heart and mind, and sense of humor, and all that. It is hard not to be touched and moved by writing that depicts scenes of children getting hurt, and violated, and tortured. With the impact of an excellent imagery, as observed in the book in question, my professionalism is sometimes overcome by the sound of my beat—which wants to witness the end of suffering, to secure a solution to misery and abuse.
Such kind of involvement with work makes me less professional but more human. I can’t just leave the scenes of these tortured souls and jump onto something else. There has to be an end, a resolution, a solution to what has drawn me as a spectator into the bleeding truth about humanity. Hence, I let myself be taken by the power of the human element, the cause, in the text which otherwise would be supposed to be my object. After completing such a book, the inner multitasking ends and leaves a deep satisfaction: the defeat of the professional, and the victory of the humanist. While it is hard to cheer up at such grave facts as described in the book I just finished, the feeling of deep satisfaction settles in my soul: the sound of my heartbeat turns into music. I have reason to smile and thank the author for helping me break loose from editing work that would otherwise best be described as mechanical.
