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March 13, 2006
Who's the author?
In the process of revising handbook chapters, for some reason I have found myself enraged by my editor's suggested changes. This is very out of character for me; I enjoy collaborative writing and regard textbook writing as a collaboration. And I have a smart editor. Yet everything she's asked of me has seemed like a huge job or an unreasonable request, and every change that I haven't agreed with has seemed criminally stupid. I've been commensurately slow about turning chapters around.
A few weeks ago I was complaining about this to a friend from another humanities discipline, a woman who has published a number of books and who is well respected in her field. She was indignant that my judgment would be challenged and made a joke out of it: "Who's the author? You're the author!" It was funny and it was heartening. But it helped me not in the way G intended; it made me reflect on how proprietary I was being about my own words.
Finally I seem to have made the breakthrough, and I can't say why. But suddenly the revising has ceased to be painful. I feel able to insist on what's important to me and concede on what isn't a deal-breaker. I feel dialogic rather than oppositional and resistant. What was the problem, and why did it go away? I have no frickin idea. I'm just glad for the relief from the pressure. It really is a beautiful handbook, made eversomuch more beautiful in the editing process, and I can't wait to have it in print and use it in my classes in something other than PDF form.
Posted by senioritis at March 13, 2006 04:49 PM
Comments
i know.
it's because you stopped to reconsider my *brilliant* exam-response about authorship: you remembered the falseness of locke's drama & how the author's dead anyway & then last but not least you remembered my foundational metaphor about how authorship is a human kind of weaving, the sort where you have to work all the time with everybody's threads, you're not the spider spinning the stuff alone & untouched out of your *butt* (& thank goodness for that), & you're a fantabulous weaver.
(doesn't that sound like the most quintessentially half-ironical yet ridiculously boastful grad-student-esque thing i have *ever* said?!)
Posted by: tyra at March 13, 2006 06:07 PM
Yes. and yes :)
Posted by: senioritis at March 13, 2006 06:49 PM
a spidery buttpluck! Wheee! (I actually like that image of someone leaning down to ruffle your hair and say, "whoooo's the author? whooo's my precious author-pauthor?")
Posted by: susansinclair at March 13, 2006 07:21 PM
I'm going to have to call the Metaphor Police. . . . .
Posted by: senioritis at March 13, 2006 08:51 PM