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The Holy Art of the Edit
by Andrew Roycroft
When it comes to the life of our favorite literature—the process by which it reaches
our shelves and our souls—there are forces at work that are easy to overlook but
whose absence would impoverish us all. There is, of course, the writer: the much
loved and highly visible figure who has been to the mountain and can tell us a tale. We
cloak this person in all kinds of myths and fables, most of them centering around
solitude and singularity of thought and purpose—the lone seer who cuts a track for us
through this weary world. We praise the writer for the work we hold in our hands and
our hearts, we travel miles to listen to them read their work and sign our books, and
we develop a kind of brand loyalty to a select band of men and women whose works
carry most worth for us.
All of this is good and appropriate in its place, but what of other figures whose work
brings literature to life? What other kinds of labor lie behind the stories, poems, and
non-fiction pieces that so enrich our understanding of the world? What kinds of things can be said of them and their endeavors?
In this piece, I want to think about the art of the edit, the work of those whose words grace our pages but whose faces are seldom known to us. Good editors are often the lifeblood of great works, the unseen minds whose influence is felt in some of the best things we enjoy. Celebrating their unseen work is important in itself, but I want to suggest that good editing is not merely a professional practice that we should seek to ‘see’ when we consume literature but that the work of the editor is suggestive of some bigger Christian values and virtues as well.
Editing and the Creation Process
As Christians, we tend to be big fans of ex nihilo—it’s how everything got started back in the beginning, and we love to perpetuate it in the media we enjoy. The flash-bang of Genesis chapter one is pretty stirring stuff, the abject nothingness of no-time and no-space somehow springs into dimension and linear process, an event of such singularity and brilliance that science is still listening to its echo. Paul Simon once wrote that ‘the universe loves a drama’ and there is no greater stage for this to be played out on than the cosmology of the Bible. Nothing, and then everything, is quite the curve and it is exciting to ride it.
The sequence of ‘let there be’ statements on God’s part and his ‘seeing that it was good’ are thrilling to read and just as exciting to replicate. We tend to love the idea of originality, regardless of our discipline. The novel novelist who reinvents the form, the artistic movement that changes how we see, the golden era of drama that recharges comedy and tragedy in ways never thought of before - these are just a few of our favorite things. We reserve words like ‘derivative’ for those works that take existing forms and refine them, and we seldom feel excited but such fine-tuning and iterative work.
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