Shelley Kenigsberg

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Just about every time we speak about the poor state of editing in today's publishing industry, mention is made of the lack of money and also of the lack of attention to structural editing. But what exactly is structural editing? At the Byron Bay Writers' Festival a couple of weeks ago, a workshop on structural editing was given by freelance editor and writer Shelley Kenigsberg.

Shelley has coordinated and delivered the Macleay Diploma in Book Editing and Publishing in Sydney for 16 years, and has developed and presented courses for the Society of Editors around Australia and the Style Council, and language and corporate institutes overseas. She joins us now from our Sydney studios.

Shelley, welcome to The Book Show.

Shelley Kenigsberg: Hi, Ramona, thanks for having me on.

Ramona Koval: Let's begin at the beginning; what's the difference between structural editing and copy editing?

Shelley Kenigsberg: It's really the scale of the edit. The structural edit is the big-picture edit, it's where you look at the general flow and shape rather than the more fine or line edits which may involve grammar and spelling.

Ramona Koval: So, flow and shape...let's talk about shape first. What is the shape of a book?

Shelley Kenigsberg: I think there are many shapes and I think the writer probably has a shape when they start, but it may not be the shape that ultimately is expressed. It's the editor's role, I suppose, to try and find out first of all what that shape was intended to be, and if indeed the author has got it right then there's no need for a huge structural edit, but a structural edit will just confirm that really all those bones are in the right place and this body isn't going to fall over. So everything is lined up.

Ramona Koval: And flow?

Shelley Kenigsberg: The flow is the movement between those different elements. Is there enough explanation? Is there too much explanation? Is there enough support for an idea? And is there a way to take the reader from one thought to another? So there's very strict emphasis on paragraphing and breaking text up into different chunks, if you like, that make it easy for the reader to get the idea, to stay emotionally involved, and that's in, to my view, non-fiction as well as fiction, and you can do that with the way you chunk the material.

Ramona Koval: It sounds very much like a form of engineering.

Shelley Kenigsberg: Yes, absolutely, it is. In fact the structural edit has been called reverse engineering because what we get or what we hope we get is a complete piece, and then we try and work out how it has been put together and maybe in that be able to identify where there was a screw loose, if you like.

Ramona Koval: When we talk about publishing we sometimes say there wasn't enough money for a structural edit so we got a quick copy edit. Why is structural editing more expensive than copy editing?

Shelley Kenigsberg: I don't know that it necessarily is but it very likely takes more time. A skilled editor can probably see the small line edits far more quickly than they can. You have to sit with a text, you have read it, and maybe even rest from it, just as a writer would do while they're drafting and redrafting. But an editor needs that time to work their way into the whole picture. So maybe it's a time thing.

Ramona Koval: So you called your workshop 'Position, Position, Position' which is borrowing from real estate as well, but that's a clue obviously, it's all about what follows what and where you start and finish. You have to have a very logical mind, don't you, to be an editor?

Shelley Kenigsberg: I like the idea of that. I'm not entirely sure. Well, yes, you have to appreciate logic, so you do need to be able to see that logic has prevailed, but it can sound like it's regulated and dry, and it's not in any way. It just has to feel satisfying, that you don't need to cross all the Ts but you need to have hinted that you understood you weren't crossing those that you didn't cross, if you know what I mean.

Ramona Koval: What is the procedure for you when you approach a text? You, of course, read it, I imagine, but what are the little alarm bells that go off at places where a structural look might need to be had at the text?

Shelley Kenigsberg: Really the first clue is that I'm not grabbed by the beginning, and that sounds very obvious really but for a lot of writers there's a lot of revving that goes on in the beginning of their writing, either because they think it's important to set scenes or they're a bit insecure about jumping in in the middle of that scene. So that to me is the major clue that I need to find the beginning. There a lovely quote from Ursula Le Guin who is quoting Chekhov (we all like to quote somebody else) and she said that when she was looking at the idea of a beautiful short story she looked no further than Chekhov and he said that very often you need to just cut out the first three pages, and more often than not you'll find that's really where the story begins. Obviously it depends if it's a shorter piece then it's going to be the first three paras, but she called it...as opposed to Ockham's razor, Chekhov's razor.

Ramona Koval: Razor blade.

Shelley Kenigsberg: Yes, and that's a point too because very often people feel like their best bits are being sliced and there's blood on the floor, because people do work very hard on their beginnings. But generally that's where I find alarm bells go off for me, and, to be honest, endings.

Ramona Koval: Why endings?

Shelley Kenigsberg: Because, again, people like the idea of making their point and then making sure that you've got the point, and so they may well rev just that last foot on the pedal at the end just to make sure you know we're home.

Ramona Koval: Right, so you have to know where enough is enough.

Shelley Kenigsberg: Yes.

Ramona Koval: I like the other quote that you have, it's Kate Grenville and she's quoting Ezra Pound, she says, 'It doesn't matter where you start, the only thing that matters is where you finish. As Ezra Pound said, it doesn't matter which leg of your table you make first as long as it stands up in the end.' And that's very important, isn't it, because it doesn't really matter if the bit that you thought was the middle is actually the beginning. Is that what she's saying?

Shelley Kenigsberg: That is what she's saying, and very often a structural edit will take what the author had put there as the fifth chapter and make it the first, and take the first and make it the last, and maybe they will collapse a prologue into the text or take an epilogue and put it back into the text. So while those elements are still within that table, they're just in a different order.

Ramona Koval: Shelley, when you talk about having to let go of the middle of the book and, say, making that the beginning, or losing something else, these things, I imagine, would be very emotionally fraught, and you would have to sit with something and get the writer used to the idea.

Shelley Kenigsberg: Any editing needs huge diplomacy but it needs compassion. It is critique, and in my view it's the kindest critique, but it always feels like something is being lost, unless or until you get the trust of the author who will know that between you this collaboration is going to make something that's bigger than the both of you.

Ramona Koval: I'm interested....you said that you wanted to stay emotionally involved and the text didn't have to just be a story, a fiction piece, you want to be emotionally involved in non-fiction. Tell me about that.

Shelley Kenigsberg: I like to think of ideas in non-fiction as characters, so you can...when you talk about structuring a fiction piece you look at the character's journey. In non-fiction I think you can look at that character's journey too, and the idea is the character. So have we actually met that character? Do we understand why it exists or what it might be facing? And if there is going to be drama, as we know all good fiction needs, is that going to keep us wanting to know what happened to the idea or that character?

Ramona Koval: So it's about mapping as well.

Shelley Kenigsberg: Yes, absolutely. And there are very good just practical ways that you can map your document. Certainly in non-fiction we use Word as an editing tool and you can go to a document map and see the shape of the main ideas which certainly in non-fiction are signposted with headings and subheadings, and you can move things around to see whether there is in fact a better shape that you can achieve.

Ramona Koval: This is a question, to see if there's a better shape. I mean, how come an editor can see what the writer can't?

Shelley Kenigsberg: The caveat is we...should I say 'we always do'? I can say...

Ramona Koval: You can lie.

Shelley Kenigsberg: I can lie. We do because we have more distance. So we're emotionally involved but we haven't really been the creators, and whilst we're attached to the book we're not attached to the 3:00am when you actually wrote that sentence that you've now come to feel very connected to and precious about. So it's the...

Ramona Koval: Because of what you sacrificed in getting to this bit?

Shelley Kenigsberg: Indeed, yes. I think that the words are invested with the memory for the writer of how it came to be on that page or on that screen. And we come fresh and we come somewhat more objective.

Ramona Koval: But what special powers of reading and imagination are required? Because often you can read something and you can say, 'Look, it's not working,' but it takes another step to say, 'and it would work perhaps if you did this.'

Shelley Kenigsberg: Yes, so you need very good analytical skills, you need to look for things like the amount of detail, and sometimes it's not working because we're drowning in too much detail. Sometimes it's not working because we don't have enough detail, we've got too much movement, we go from one idea to the next without any breathing space. So a writer would look at what we call transitions, how you lead from one paragraph to another, and you have some checklists, if you like, of things you look for that can point you to identify the problems.

Ramona Koval: And what's on the checklists?

Shelley Kenigsberg: On the checklists...there are things like pace, and whether there's an even quality. With that there is not only an evenness but enough variation.

Ramona Koval: Gee, it sounds intuitive almost. How do you know whether you're not interfering with the author's style, if somebody is just into that kind of detailed description? I mean, some people do that a lot and I can't stand it but that doesn't mean that other people won't love it.

Shelley Kenigsberg: No, indeed, so you have to drop your own preferred style and look at what works for the text. At the beginning of any edit you ask yourself 'who's this book for, what is this book for, who will read it, and can I understand how they will read it?' and that will affect whether you allow things that might not be your preferred way, as you say...I'm with you, I'm not overly keen on lots and lots of flowery description, but for some people that is their trademark and their readers love it. So you have to understand who the audience is. And you're right, it is intuitive. I think a good editor is a good reader and you need to be broadly read and you need to know the genre and you need to...you just get a sense, I suppose.

Ramona Koval: This is interesting because you do give these workshops and I wasn't at your workshop but I just wonder how much you can teach. It's sort of like teaching the art of writing or the art of editing. How can you teach someone to be intuitive and to have that sort of sense of smell about a text?

Shelley Kenigsberg: To be honest, I think the people who come to my classes already have a sense of their own skill with words. They're either writers or they're editors. I had a very lovely thing happen at the Bryon workshop actually, one of the people there was an author and she had been struggling with the end of her book, but she came to me the day after and she said it was because of your idea of the promise in the beginning and then the promise at the end that I went back to that beginning and found my ending.

So what I do is try and give people those particular analytical tools, some very practical techniques of cutting the material up and laying it out on the floor and literally throwing things up in the air and seeing where they land and seeing whether there's a better form than what they were given. Changing the form of the text...sometimes there are long passages of dialogue which should just be narration, sometimes there's swags and swags of description that could just be a couple of lines of dialogue, and that's a structural edit. So those are the kinds of things that hopefully I can pass on in a workshop.

Ramona Koval: Shelley, thank you so much for illuminating the structural edit for us on The Book Show today.

Shelley Kenigsberg: It's been an absolute pleasure.

Ramona Koval: Shelley Kenigsberg is a freelance editor and writer based in Sydney.