Photograph of Alexandra Fuller in Wyoming by Laure Joliet, The New York Times/Redux. No copyright infringement intended.

I met Alexandra (Bobo) Fuller for the first time at the Franschhoek Literary Festival in 2009. It was a blustery wet night back when winter still delivered plentiful rain. The fanfare accompanying her memoir of her Zimbabwean childhood, Don’t Let’s Go To The Dogs Tonight, preceded her everywhere. So I was star-struck, and even more so when overhearing someone ask her how her visit to Zambia had been – she’d just come from visiting family there: “My parents are fine, and there was a puffadder living under my bed.”

I had grown up with boomslangs in the attic. Common ground? I loitered closer. And then the kind of opportunity fans dream of presented itself: Fuller continued, in the carrying tones of those educated in anglophone boarding schools: “I’m having the most appalling period pains. I want to curl up and howl. Truly, I might be dying, and I’ve got this whole effing evening to get through.”

Hallelujah! In my handbag I carried extremely effective meds for this very purpose. I stepped forward and offered them. I gave her one to take immediately, washed down with the glass of red wine in her hand, another to swallow if no relief within 30 minutes, and a third for the next day. She gulped down the magic pill with profuse thanks and zero qualms about accepting drugs from a stranger, and then tides of people took her away. Half an hour later, there was a tug at my arm. “It’s a miracle! I feel human again.”

So after that bonding experience, there was affection and connection whenever our paths and years crossed. She came across an anthology on landscapes of Southern Africa (Lovely Beyond Any Singing) that I had compiled; living thousands of miles from her heart-home, it became a portal to Africa for her. Meanwhile, I gobbled up everything she wrote.

Don’t Let’s Go To The Dogs Tonight introduced readers to her piercing combination of honesty and generosity (“she looks back with rage and love,” said one reviewer), as well as a sometimes near-hallucinatory style. I found Scribbling The Cat, an account of her travels with a veteran of the “Rhodesian War” too intense and unguarded to bear, but her next book, The Legend of Colton H. Bryant, is a small masterpiece of biography. In it, she tells the true and haunting story of a young Wyoming roustabout who fell to his death from an oil rig because the drilling company had failed to install safety rails.

She told me she’d written her first three books because silence has never been an option for her: the first was an attempt to give voice to what had until then been unspoken, the second the unspeakable (“an impossible project”), and in the third, she tried to speak for the speechless dead.

It’s hard not to admire the honesty with which she writes of a dysfunctional (“operatic”) but loving home, of the struggles to locate herself within adopted, adored and ultimately alien countries. Her Africa memoirs culminate in Cocktail Hour Under The Tree of Forgetfulness, a loving account of her mother’s extraordinary, messy and bravura life. One of the most striking scenes involves Nicola Fuller, who insisted on flying lessons, singing “Fly Me To The Moon” under a swollen gold moon as she comes in to land on a patchy Zambian airfield. 

Relocating to Wyoming after marrying an American, Fuller forged ahead with writing the stories of yet another adopted home, and so came The Legend of Colton H. Bryant and Leaving Before the Rains Come. When she read from the former at the Cape Town launch at the Book Lounge, her audience held cans of Mountain Dew in one hand and tissues in the other.

Until I read her most recent work, her debut novel Quiet Until the Thaw, I found Leaving her most absorbing book: a memoir of the corrosive effects of unresolved trauma, displacement and financial disaster on two generations of family. But this is no kitchen-sink drama; the book charges towards a cliffhanger that would be improbable in fiction. Against the backdrop of their crumbling marriage, she fights like a tiger to save her husband’s life after a riding accident leaves him on the point of death. It’s clear that even if she made a lousy wife (she is brutally honest about her failings), she’s a very good person to have in your corner when things go wrong.

Now, after producing memoirs of a range of unforgettable people, ranging from her closest kin to a stranger, she has turned to fiction. She is in South Africa to attend Stellenbosch University’s Woordefees, a festival that celebrates and attracts a wide range of cultural and literary artists. This gave us the chance to spend an hour talking about the past, her new novel, and the life she has recrafted in Wyoming, where she now lives in a yurt: “Impermanence has become important”, she says.

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The thing about Alexandra Fuller is that if you ask her how she is, she will tell you. She is unflinchingly, almost unnervingly truthful. We pick up from our last conversation as if years, an ocean and two books haven’t intervened. She tells me of the shattering breakdown that followed the death of her father, to whom her novel is dedicated: of the family upheaval that followed, the self-medicating with alcohol, the flashbacks to childhood traumas, the struggle to come to terms with her parents’ failure to protect her from a predatory neighbour, which for her is wound up one of her lifelong tasks: comprehending and atoning for the complicity of her settler history and its embedding in colonial racism.

The connection might not seem obvious to the casual bystander, but it’s all about cycles of violence, she keeps telling me. They keep repeating, and so we have to understand how deep they run, the places they have their roots. Few people hold so squarely in their sights the mechanics of how patriarchal exploitation and abuse of women and children is tied into the structural violence of racism and colonialism, of the exploitation of the planet’s resources to the extent of making our only home uninhabitable, of genocides and the way military, political and cultural forces enact these, and then blame the victims for the host of ills that follow.

This brings us to her most recent work and first novel, Quiet Until The Thaw. Set on an Indian reservation (“The Rez”) of the Lakota Oglala Sioux Nation, in South Dakota, it tells the story of cousins who choose different paths in response to their experiences of being pushed to the barest margins of society in their own country. Written with deceptive simplicity, it engages with all the issues mentioned above, most especially the perennial problem of violence, and the only solution: to recognise the interconnectedness of all things and peoples, and thus to grasp that any violence we perpetrate will haunt, twist and scar us, and our children, and their children.

When giving testimony against the oil company on whose rig Colton H. Bryant died, she discovered that different procedures were followed when drilling on Indian land. She began to visit, to listen, joining in endurance rides where she was “invisible”. I tease her about rushing in again where angels fear to tread: a white woman, a double settler, trying to tell the story of another culture, another way of life. She acknowledges the enormity of this task, that she strove above all “for humility”. It shows in her writing.

I ask how it felt, making the jump from memoir to fiction – a stumbling block for many writers – and she laughs: “This is the most autobiographical thing I’ve ever written.”

This might seem strange, especially if one reads the blurb on the back cover, which repeats all the familiar tropes of a multi-generational Cain-and-Abel story, of “broedertwis”, giving the impression one has picked up a family saga with an extra dollop of liberal earnestness. Nothing could be further from the truth: the book has no epic thrust or sprawling narrative. Instead, it is a series of beautifully wrought vignettes, written in chapters of no more than 250 words at a time, with chapter headings that advance the story. These near-fragments are funny, searing, lyrical and wise.

“They’re all true,” she tells me. “Everything in that book, all the characters: they’re real – it’s all reportage. I just listened and stitched the pieces together.” She goes on to explain that the structure of the book is modelled on Indian storytelling, where one voice will speak, and another will chime in with a detail or the addition of a character or event, and then another; the story belongs to all. Even when creation myths are told, they are spoken quietly to sleeping children.

One of the pleasures of the book is Fuller’s trademark lyricism: “Snow around the tepee became like mashed sweet potatoes, then like kernels of corn, then granular sugar, and finally it melted completely and puddled up in the tufts of last year’s old grass.” Even the throwaway phrases – “tiny wrens with their big songs” – are polished to perfection.

This is not to say that Fuller doesn’t also recount the bad, the ugly, the bleak and the frankly hideous: she pulls no punches about life on an Indian reservation, and the ills that bloom like black mould in these contexts of despair and deprivation. She manages that rare trick: effective sarcasm, and although the book spans seven decades, from McCarthyism to Standing Rock, trenchant commentary on current events is never far away: for instance, she writes that the absence of incest taboos among white settler Americans eventually created “a class of chinless, insecure, wig-wearing golfers”.

The book distills a great deal of wisdom, but this extract showcases both the extreme pragmatism and idealism Fuller learned from the Lakota – the “much madness [that] is divinest sense”:

Even if we stopped everything right now, all the war and abuse and hurt and injury, and treated each other with nothing but love.

We’d still have generations to go before we settled into real peace, but it would be real peace.

The question isn’t “Why bother?”

It’s “Why not?”

Perhaps the answer is that most people don’t believe in themselves enough to imagine one or two or seven generations down the line, the way the Lakota are trained to think. Perhaps they refuse to entrust the possibility of peace to some as yet unborn descendants because their own ancestors no such respect for their possibility of peace. An eye for an eye in ever-increasing cycles of violence going all the way around to where this all ends, and all begins.

So when I ask her about recent events in Zimbabwe, her message remains the same: while she is encouraged, even overjoyed by the departure of two Southern African despots, Robert Mugabe and Jacob Zuma, her question is: will these changes, upheavals even, break what in a National Geographic interview she calls “the half-life of war”, the pattern of violence that haunts both countries?

We also speak about the water crisis afflicting Cape Town in particular, but with the drought so severe that three South African provinces have been declared national disaster zones. We speak about the myopia of the middle classes, the consumerist grasshoppers who go on devouring resources as if they were as limitless as our appetites for stuff, for profligacy, for waste. This numbness, the profound disconnection between we who live on the earth and our immediate surroundings, as if we are not interlinked and inter-dependent, is something she tackles head-on in Quiet Until The Thaw.

We return, finally, to the yurt that is now her home. I tell her that she has come full circle: that after a life of wandering, she is now a permanent itinerant. She yelps with laughter: “I hadn’t thought of it that way, but you’re right.”

I wish her the peace she deserves. And look forward to reading about her future inward and outward journeys.

I was dreading Women's Day -- hell, the whole month -- this year. Here we were, the 60th anniversary of the historic women's march on the Union Buildings barrelling down on us, and almost every single thing about the status and treatment of South African women that's had me frothing at the mouth for decades is so firmly entrenched, it feels like it's been set in concrete.

Right now I'm out the country, which has been an effective way of dodging the usual infuriating, patronising, tone-deaf, saccharine, sexist, and generally asinine things that government, media and corporations do and say at this time of year. In case you aren't quite sure what I'm referring to, see Rebecca Davis's savage pink list here.

But for the first time in a long time, I feel a little wriggle of hope. Why? Because even on another continent, it's been impossible to miss news of the protest by four women who stood before Number One as he tried to heh-heh his way through a post-election debriefing, holding up placards commemorating one of the lowest points in South's Africa's then adolescent democracy: the Zuma rape trial and acquittal, which openly endorsed and entrenched South Africa's particularly noxious brand of rape culture. Their strategy was brilliant -- four young women in elegant black dresses stepped to the front of the auditorium and stood between the president and his audience in silence, their backs to him, literally replacing his words with the ones written on their placards.

Millions must share my relief at knowing that Khwezi, the name given to the Zuma rape accuser, has not been forgotten, that young South Africans recognise the price she paid (nothing less than exile), that the unashamedly sexist, irresponsible and dangerous.behaviour modelled by a man then about to seize leadership of the country has not been swept under the carpet. For an excellent commentary on the significance of their actions, read the unfailingly reliable Sisonke Msimang. If this is the calibre of young activists today, then we can breathe a little easier.

And there have been other glimmers. Prof Pumla Dineo Gqola wrote an electrifyingly good book on rape in South Africa -- angry, articulate, breathless with momentum and bristling with signposts to alternative ways of living our lives without fear. And then she won the Alan Paton award -- South Africa's most prestigious prize for non-fiction -- for it. Michelle Hattingh wrote a memoir (I'm The Girl Who Was Raped) that made for bleak reading, but spelled out clearly and without shame, the multitude of ways the criminal justice system, the medical profession, and society in general, utterly fails rape survivors. Less solution-oriented than Gqola's book, it still makes it crystal clear that our current models for dealing with sexual violence are abject failures; that as long as we deplore rape while accepting and/or encouraging rape culture, nothing will change.

I marked this 60th year since our foremothers massed into one brave cohort and marched on the citadel of apartheid by digging out my research on sexual violence for the umpteenth time, and trying to put the bits I've published into a single manuscript. This time, it actually got off to a publisher. A book doesn't have the immediacy of a rant: but there is so much to say, so much to be undone, unpicked, re-imagined, I had to give it a bash.

So, this year, take the swearing and the fury as a given. And hopefully, next year there'll be a book with constructive analysis, as a tiny token of honour and respect for South African women, and the heavy lifting they do. And as always: donate to Rape Crisis, who do the hard stuff, the life-saving work.

Spend a day creating children's books, and this is what you might encounter. A platinum blonde with electric bunny ears. Two poets in Darth Vader masks duelling each other with fairy wands. A little boy in a scarlet petticoat and ladybird wings. A trio sporting fake eyebrows and moustaches. And that's just the people making the books.

At long last, I got to attend my first Book Dash day yesterday. The impetus: South African (and African) children don't see nearly enough of themselves or their stories on the pages of books -- or if they do, the books are commissioned with the education market in mind, often worthy/preachy, poorly designed and illustrated, and about as light as poured concrete. Besides, for poor families, spending money on a child's book for recreational reading is out of the question.

The brains (and great big hearts -- Arthur Attwell, Michelle Matthews, Tarryn-Anne Anderson, Julia Norrish) behind the Book Dash concept believe that it's vital for very young children to have access to books, something borne out by decades of research on early childhood development. So they make it happen through a truly genius system: they ask teams of three (writer, illustrator and designer) to give one day of their time to create a book for free. Teams are supported by editors, tech advisers and logistical crew, and provided with vast amounts of delicious food and drink.

All the books are licensed under a creative commons agreement, so that anyone can download or print out the books for non-commercial use. This means they can be translated into any language in the world -- for free. So no royalties or copyright fees.

The infrastructural costs of running a Book Dash day, at a central location (itself often donated), are met by corporate sponsors. (Yesterday's marathon was sponsored by Decorland: muchas gracias!) Fundraising campaigns aim to meet the single biggest expense -- printing. (See here for Lauren Beukes's brilliant means of raising enough money to print 50 000 books. Yes, that is the correct number of zeros.) Structures such as NPOs and educational initiatives that have the capacity to distribute the books are identified. Et voila, little children get to own their very first books.

I arrived both stressed and excited: how was I going to provide editing support to three teams for stories that still had to be written? I needn't have worried. When, for instance, I told poet and storyteller Philippa Namutebi Kabali-Kagwa that her 800-word folktale source needed to be a maximum of 120 words for this age group, and its rich assembly of characters needed to be cut to three, she sat down and knocked out a perfect story in an hour. I fell upon her neck, proposing marriage.

Maya Marshak, the artist on the team creating Katiita's Song, had flu, but still painted delicate, empathetic panels before being sent home to bed, with designer Kirsten Walker stepping into the breach and making sure we had something exquisite to present at the end of the day. Philippa composed a song that Maama sings to her little daughter, Katiita, and performed it for us, complete with growly gorilla voices, at the Show and Tell session -- this might be Book Dash's first audio-book.

I mostly just hovered appreciatively around "my" other teams: The Best Thing Ever, created by Melissa Fagan (writer), Lauren Nel (illustrator) and Stefania Origgi (designer); and Little Sock, created by Chani Coetzee (designer), Lili Probart (artist) and Jon Keevy (writer who should be doing stand-up, if he isn't already). The Best Thing Ever is about Muzi, a small boy who discovers the magic of found objects on a trip to his Gogo. I was so busy clasping my hands in delight over the charm of the story and the paintings Lauren Nel was doing, I only registered the subtle messages about the environment, imagination and transformation later. Likewise, the story of Little Sock was essentially "The Odyssey, but with a single sock" -- the kind of story that delivers both to adults and littlies. It was funny and quirky, off-the-wall and underground, and I loved it.

It's impossible to describe the atmosphere of a Dash Day. Part of the magic is that people who give this kind of time to make children's books are special. I've long known that anyone, esp in SA, who cares about and creates children's lit deserves a special place in heaven. Then there's the feeling of being in a huge adult kindergarten. State of the art tech shares space with pastels, crayons, craft paper, paints. Writers tell their tales, an artist picks up a paintbrush and an idea blooms on a page, in colour. It's lump-in-the-throat stuff, especially when writing for this particular age group (yesterday's efforts were for 3-5 year-olds). Make no mistake, it's hard writing for kids: they can't be fobbed off with cheesy, preachy or boring.

Everywhere I looked, there was something truly wonderful happening. Jacqui L'Ange wrote a story about a shongololo's disappearing shoes that had layers of wit and heart. Martha Evans, wearing an author instead of an editor hat, said of working in tandem with an illustrator and designer: "It's like that moment when you get a perfect cover -- but over and over."

The shrewdly planned catering involved an endless supply of delicious goodies, featuring masses of protein, no refined carbs or sugar until after the 3pm slump (at which chocolate was introduced into the mix). Endless tea, coffee, Red Bull (I had my first: cherry liqueur meets Iron Brew -- yuk, but what a caffeine rush), with wine broached at 5pm. The cheerleading and support staff were also amazing: special thanks to Noélle Ruby-Mae Koeries and Tarryn-Ann Anderson for cups of tea, TLC and well-timed hugs.

I'm glad Philippa spoke about the elephant in the room: the preponderance of white (and female) faces. She was disappointed, but it was partly circumstantial; seven black would-be participants couldn't make the specified date. Then there are the factors that should be obvious, but often aren't: asking people to work for free for a 15-hour day (if you include travel) takes a middle-class layer of resources, as well as ease of access to a central urban location. And in spite of being a small sector of the population, white Saffers have a dense concentration of specialist skills by definition, because of the affirmative advantages our education and access have bestowed on us. But there are plans afoot, including attracting funding so that Book Dashes happen in other African countries.

There was a moving moment when Maya showed us her painting of the character, Maama: we were exclaiming over the beauty of both the artwork and the character, when Philippa said "I'm not used to seeing my face -- a black woman's face -- rendered as a model of loveliness and goodness. We're presented with so many Western ideals of beauty that it's a pleasant shock when I see a representation of myself as someone beautiful, a heroine."

And meanwhile, the fairy-dust kept swirling in the air: I made new friends, learned new things, and bopped with two Sams -- one of whom, Sam Wilson (of Zodiac fame), helped co-create a book without words or text -- tricky, but invaluable for this age group -- and presented the book to an appreciative audience via interpretive dance. But to get a taste of the energy, colour and zing of the event, look at the photos.

To my delight and surprise, I won a prize for being Book Dash's Number One Fan. But believe me, taking part was the prize. I can't wait to do it all again.

Several years ago, the poet Ingrid de Kok, who polishes her own work with something akin to wave action, told me she believed that eighty per cent of South African fiction, both by newcomers and established writers, was under-edited. As an experienced freelance editor who trains other editors, I agree. I seethe with frustration when clearly talented, even brilliant writers produce work unnecessarily marred by flaws as a result. And by flaws, I don’t just mean the typos and grammar mistakes that more and more reviewers grumble about. I mean confused arguments and rambling descriptions and irrelevant characters and thin research and plot holes and repetition and dénouements that rely on amazing coincidence. I’m fed up with reading local fiction and non-fiction books that look like drafts, and thinking: “This shows such promise – what a pity it wasn’t properly edited.”

I hear this lament from colleagues and reviewers all the time. South African writing is currently experiencing an extraordinarily fertile boom (it’s arguably a victim of its own success, as an astonishing body of emerging talent explodes into print), and we’re doing it a disservice by not supporting it with professional standards of publishing.

But this is not necessarily because there’s a shortage of good editors. The reasons are both crassly obvious and a great deal more complex. In the first category, I have two words: time and money.

But before I wade in and tackle problems in the industry, I want to salute local publishers – especially independent and literary imprints – for the heroic efforts they make to find and publish innovative work under difficult circumstances. Most of the publishers I know personally work insanely hard for the love of literature – it’s certainly not their pay that’s motivating them. And they are providing a platform for a scintillating and diverse chorus of voices who would not be able to get even an agent – much less a publisher – to take them seriously abroad.

That said, let’s unpack this question of time and money, starting with the latter. Contrary to popular belief, the publishing industry in this country is not a wealthy or even a comfortable one. School textbooks are the mainstay of the industry, and trade publishers stay afloat by producing dictionaries, cookbooks and Bible study guides. Producing literary or intellectual works is the least profitable form of publishing in this country. This is because South Africans don’t buy books, much less fiction, and when they do, it’s the latest Danielle Steel. The best-seller fiction lists seldom feature more than two South African authors – André Brink and Deon Meyer – all good and well, but what about our up-and-coming writers?

Yet there are dreamers and gamblers who believe in supporting and publishing South African writing, who invest in our vast reservoirs of talent. But they invariably run on the slimmest of shoe-string budgets. Even in well-established publishing companies, belts are always on the tightest notch: a few years ago, the MD of a respected middle-sized local publisher advertised for a PA. An excellent candidate was identified, and asked her current salary. It was more than the MD was earning at the time.

Editors – both in-house and freelance – are notoriously poorly paid, especially for editing good local writing. What’s more, publishers can seldom compete with what other sectors can offer: editing for the private sector, parastatal, government or academic institutions, international organisations and publishers, and even NGOs, pays at least twice, and sometimes three times more than editing for local publishers. The above tend to reward expertise, track record and experience in a way that local publishers rarely do (they can’t afford to). The latter will usually offer standard freelance rates to whoever comes along, regardless of whether they’re a twenty-three-year-old with scant experience, or a recognised editor, with decades of experience and numerous award-winning books to their credit.

But is the pay really that bad? The problem is that editing budgets are usually set in advance (in bigger publishing houses, by finance honchos who’ve never edited a book in their lives) or calculated according to a formula that suggests that editing is a standard procedure for all manuscripts, rather like servicing a car (R XX per thousand words, or sometimes per page, on the assumption that it will take an editor one hour to do one thousand words or X number of pages). But until you’re immersed in a project, it’s impossible to estimate just how much work is involved, and both publishers and editors err on the side of hopeless optimism when budgeting.

In my case, at least three or four times a year, publishers dangle irresistible local projects under my nose: original, sometimes exceptional writing by gifted authors who’ve often specifically requested that I work with them. The publishers stretch their editing budgets, and I scale my rates down to meet them. The authors and I get happily engrossed, lengthy meetings are held, and chapters whiz back and forth via e-mail. I’ll comb through the authors’ reworked MSS up to four times; usually three times, and never less than twice.

All this is deeply satisfying, not least because of the learning curve for both parties. But there’s a down side to doing the job properly (i.e., over and over again until it’s right): as a primary source of income, for someone with four degrees, four post-doctoral fellowships, and over two decades of experience as a writer, editor and academic, I might as well wait tables (in fact, I’m told this pays better). Can I afford to do this on a regular basis? No.

This is why many of South Africa’s most competent editors have alternate careers, or work for clients able to pay us what we’re worth. As a result, we live on a constant see-saw between selling ourselves short in order to do exciting and worthwhile work, and earning enough to pay the bills.

This feeds into a general editing malaise. There are indeed some fabulously bad editors out there. As a writer, I’m also on the receiving end, and I take a crumb of comfort from the fact that the times my writing has been turned to gibberish, British and American editors have been responsible, while the best editors I’ve worked with – as a fiction, academic and trade author – have been local. (It’s worth noting that editing in South Africa, no matter how shaky, does not even begin to compare with the abyss into which the craft has plunged in North America and Europe, where many publishers have abandoned any pretence at editing, simply sending manuscripts straight to press.)

But far more common than downright bad editing is the phenomenon of what I call Killer Robot Editors – those who simply work mechanically through a text, correcting grammatical and idiomatic errors and checking that if the bedroom walls are green on page 67, they’re not blue on page 134. Some call this line- or copyediting – I think of it as glorified proofreading. Yet, this is all that most publishers budget for, and what many editors consider the extent of their responsibilities. I once supervised a punctilious editor who had carefully corrected each sentence of a linguistically mangled report. Checking the final result, I looked at the three lengthy opening paragraphs of convoluted waffle (now grammatically pristine), took my red pen, and reduced them to three succinct sentences. The editor gasped: “But are we allowed to do that?”

This is exactly what I believe editors should be doing. But this kind of intervention – which is what I think of as real editing – comes very close to ghost-writing, or précis; itself a form of ghost-writing, and one that takes great skill. Publishers who support this kind of editing – especially financially – are the exception, not the rule.

The formulas for freelance rates, calculated in terms of number of words edited, simply don’t fit the realities of editing. I once worked on a manuscript written in a kind of shorthand: 48 000 words long when I got it, it was 75 000 words long when I had finished “editing” it. And how is an editor to be rewarded for effecting cuts, or compacting works into the page extent set by the publisher? (I’ve twice taken non-fiction manuscripts of 500 000 words each, meticulously researched and dense with facts, and, at the insistence of the publisher, reduced them to half that length.)

Then there is the question of time. The speed with which a publisher can move a book from manuscript stage to final product on the shelves of the bookstores is a major factor in staying afloat financially. The longer a book spends in production, the more money it costs the publisher. This principle also applies to editors, especially freelance ones – it’s not only tempting, but fiscally prudent to zip through a manuscript, collect the cheque and move onto the next one. At worst, this can lead to “take the money and run” tactics: I recently audited a spectacularly sub-standard edit done on an MS of 50 000 words – it had been edited in nine and a half hours flat (the industry standard is around forty hours).

My single biggest problem is not the rates publishers pay, but the time-frames they allow for editing. Sometimes only weeks are allowed for processes that should take months. Proofreaders also need time to do their jobs properly, and often, in the haste to get a book out for the Book Fair (April and May are collective nervous breakdown months in South African publishing) or some other event in the marketing calendar, they are required to do the impossible. Likewise, rushed or incompetent typesetting can wreck the best efforts of both editor and proofreader.

All these pressures, like many apparently neutral processes in this country, do a great disservice to new and developing writers, especially emergent black writers. Novice writers, and those who might need support with language editing, are particularly disadvantaged both by the mechanical approach to editing, and the lack of time available for the process.

And there are more complex factors operating as well. It is no coincidence that some of our best editors are also gifted writers: one thinks of Ivan Vladislavić, Bongani Kona, Martha Evans and Mike Nicol, for starters. But because editing requires that one write as if one is someone else – becoming, in effect, a writing chameleon – most of us find that editing stifles our own creative voices. This is a dilemma to which there is no easy solution.

But even for those editors whose textual instincts are unerring, but who have no desire to write themselves, editing can become disheartening and demoralising. Lynda Gilfillan, a superb editor who specialises in fiction, notes that editing is one of the most misunderstood and underappreciated tasks around. Editors are generally viewed, by authors, publishers and the public alike, as menial labourers in the literary vineyards, part domestic workers of the text (who tidy up sloppy punctuation and attend to the dirty laundry of incomplete and messy referencing), part carping, red-pen wielding primary-school teachers who pounce upon split infinitives. Low down in the publishing hierarchy, any competent in-house editor is rapidly promoted up the ladder, further and further away from the grubby labour of spinning manuscripts of straw into books of gold.

Editing is also often performed under extremely trying circumstances. It demands unwavering concentration and focus. Yet the in-house editor’s day includes coaxing tardy suppliers, briefing designers, attending meetings, and dozens of other vexatious interruptions. It is simply not possible to edit a 650-page academic monograph of immense complexity if the phone keeps ringing. Actually, it’s not possible to edit – much less proofread – anything in disruptive working conditions. So when I was OUPSA’s academic editor, I soon began staying late in the evenings and coming in to the office over weekends, so as to be able to do my job in peace. (I hasten to add that publishing staff are rarely paid for working overtime, not least because many would double their salaries each month.)

Inevitably, being stuck in a meagrely paid and low-status job that makes it impossible to have a normal social or family life leads to the decision to go freelance. But this is no bowl of cherries, either. It can be lonely, and inevitably one becomes isolated from the trends and concerns of mainstream publishing. There is often no peer support or evaluation, no one to correct or guide.

To add insult to injury, editing is by definition one of those jobs in which the innocent are blamed and the non-participants are rewarded. One is held responsible for things over which one has no control (the vagaries of typesetters, the fact that the author went to a funeral instead of reading final proofs) and blamed for the sins of others (the author’s stubborn refusal to excise a character who adds nothing to the plot, the carelessness of the indexer).

The sad truth is that a good edit is invisible to all except the two or three people who looked at the initial manuscript, and the author; but an inadequate edit is glaringly obvious to all but the most oblivious reader. So, to reiterate, ours is quite literally a thankless task – our finest work is unsung, unacknowledged, unseen, or at best, attributed to the author – but should we get it wrong, we are excoriated.

This all sounds very gloomy, but it points to an important truth we still mostly ignore in South Africa (here the overseas book industry does have an edge on us): it is critical to recognise good editing. Elinor Sisulu, former Chair of the Book Development Foundation and herself an internationally acclaimed writer, feels that good editing must be lauded, and good editors acknowledged. She would like to see national awards and prizes going to those responsible for particularly skilled work, with publishers and authors identifying and nominating candidates. She argues that this will also create a greater awareness of what it is that editors actually do – a useful intervention, given that there are authors who still treat their editors as supernumerary typists or human spell-checkers.

The golden rule here (just read the acknowledgements page of any international best-seller) is Appreciate The Editor. I wouldn’t go as far as Stephen King (who announces “The editor is always right” – although I love him for saying it), but it is worth contemplating that some of the world’s most famous authors insist on working with certain prized editors they trust, following them even when that editor moves to another publisher. This has led to overseas publishers who hope to sign a stellar author wooing his or her editor. Food for thought.

So what can publishers do to improve editing standards in South Africa?

Better pay for editors would help retain skills in the field, but this presupposes a general improvement in the way writing per se is appreciated and rewarded. Bluntly, until South Africans buy more books, our publishers will continue to operate on the smell of an oil-rag.

But there are certain things that publishers can do to acknowledge the efforts of a good freelance editor, and ease their burden.

First and by far the most important: they can pay us promptly – within five working days (it shouldn’t take more than that to check we’ve done the job properly), via EFT, and without subtracting tax at source. Nothing makes me see redder than publishers (and there are many of them) who’ll beg an editor on their knees to meet an impossible deadline – one that involves sacrificing time with family, skipping exercise, serious sleep deprivation and mainlining coffee at 2am – only to become all skittish and helpless the minute payment falls due. The non-appearance of your cheque is blamed on the iron-clad rules of their draconian Finance Department (to whom you are just another creditor, to be warded off for ninety days if possible), and you discover that the contract the publisher gladly signed, promising to pay within thirty days, isn’t worth the paper it was written on.

The hypocrisy, the sheer bad faith of it makes me gag, especially given that the nature of editing means that it’s not possible to juggle lots of different overlapping projects; freelance editors who are able to immerse themselves in more than two projects at once are seldom doing a very good job. So we are exceptionally vulnerable to tardiness in the cheque department. In one of my favourite fantasies, I have the power to delay – by an arbitrary time ranging from one week to six months – the salary of every employee in every publisher’s Finance Department, from the CFO down. Let them feel what it’s like to rack up frightening overdraft costs, explain why they can’t settle their monthly bills, risk driving an uninsured car or losing medical aid cover because their stop-orders have bounced – through no fault of their own. To top it off, I’d like a select few to have their cars or houses repossessed. And then I’d say to them: “The money is there, you will be paid, I can’t tell you when, we are just sorting out some administrative issues, but it is coming.”

To put it more elegantly, there is a hadith that says: “Pay your worker while the sweat is still on his brow.”

Next rant: did you know that publishers are neither legally obliged nor entitled to deduct tax at source from payments to freelance editors? Many of us endure this, but few can afford to have 25% of gross income on loan to SARS interest-free at any given moment. Close reading of the relevant tax legislation is most illuminating. If you are a freelancer meeting your own overheads and a registered provisional taxpayer in good standing, and can prove it, publishers have no business subtracting tax from your payment.

But it’s not just about the money (or the respect – or lack thereof – that it conveys for a high-skill job). What about training – the great South African panacea?

A whole host of copy-editing courses have sprung up in recent years. But my sense is that these teach the kind of mechanical line-editing I describe above. I believe that editing is an art for which one needs an aptitude that cannot be taught. Skilled editing is as much an ear for cadence as it is an eye for correctness and consistency; so if there is no inner ear that can hear how the sentence should fall, no X-ray eye that can detect the idea buried in a mass of tortuous prose, no deft ability to excavate it with all the dross trimmed away, training will be to no avail. In fact, it can make matters worse, rendering editors utterly formulaic. The knack to good editing consists of knowing when the rules can and should be broken.

Good editors also tend to have certain personality types; words like “obsessive-compulsive”, “typical Virgo” and “nit-picking” have been bandied about. But true editors are not necessarily geeky perfectionists; given that their work requires that they be diplomats, counsellors, navigators and plastic surgeons, really good editors have excellent people skills and vast stores of tact. And they are also constantly and insatiably curious, with an interest in the world around them that arms them with a magpie store of general knowledge.

So I’m a bit dubious about weekend copyediting courses. The above skills can and should be developed, ideally in-house, but they cannot be transplanted. Meanwhile, in an era of cost-cutting, publishers are employing fewer in-house editors, and with the economic slow-down, freelancers are being abandoned as “luxuries” as well. So competent editors are draining out of the workforce, and editorial skills are contracting.

Ideally, publishers should actively train their in-house staff in a structured way rather than on the run. If seniors haven’t the time (and generally they don’t), they should pay someone experienced to come in and do it for them. It’s considered standard practice to send marketing and sales departments off on team-building exercises or training junkets, so there’s no reason not to run workshops for your editorial staff. If you have a stable of freelancers you use regularly, train them too. Better still, pay for follow-up. Have someone come in for two hours once a fortnight, say, to check through the in-house editor’s work. No one has time to do quality control anymore, and that’s another reason for the uneven editing I see. I was fortunate that when I was first learning the ropes at OUPSA, the editor managing my project checked my work, tweaked it, gave me feedback and encouragement – and she did this daily. (Penny Nyren, wherever you are, God bless you.)

Another common assumption related to training is that only those whose first language is English have the potential to edit, which is often a politically correct way of implying that blacks can’t edit. This is rubbish. Yes, mother-tongue fluency is essential in an editor (and it is no good attending an editing course in the hope that this will remedy your linguistic shortcomings), but most educated denizens of the African continent speak four or five languages with a skill that puts the average white South African to shame. The world-famous writers Wole Soyinka and Nuruddin Farah used to earn their bread by editing (in English) before becoming household names. Locally, some of the most respected publishers of largely English imprints have Afrikaans as their first language.

It is not the multilingualism of South Africa’s would-be editors that presents the problem, but poor education – both the decades of appalling (and deliberately inferior) education under apartheid, and the chaotic state of education since 1994. Brian Wafawarowa, CEO of New Africa Books, feels that once South African publishers start employing and interning black staff, not necessarily as editors, but as designers, typesetters and on production, marketing and sales teams, in one generation, their children will be editing local fiction with confidence. The best preparation for this is to read and read and read – according to local literacy initiatives, first in an indigenous language, and then in English. So before waxing indignant at the lack of black editors in South Africa, replace your children’s iPods, DVDs and Playstations with books.

What can editors do?

Get together with your peers. Whether you do so socially or professionally, this offers an opportunity to network, ask questions and bounce ideas around. Talk to each other online and via e-mail, but try to meet in person, too. Once, at a meeting between myself and three other editors on a team project, conversation turned to the placement of commas in cited material. After five minutes of heated debate, someone started to laugh: “Listen to us – what a bunch of train-spotters!” Editors are indeed train-spotters, and getting together with your fellows to compare notes on the strange esoterica of the craft is valuable, and fun besides.

The corollary is that if you are a senior and established editor, you should mentor younger practitioners, especially if you spot someone promising. I subcontract out a lot of small jobs largely because it gives me the opportunity to identify editors with potential, and to keep an eye on their progress.

Next, you can stand up for your rights. You can insist on the best possible rate of pay within the available budget, a reasonable time-frame, prompt payment (in instalments for lengthy projects) and decent treatment (it is the publisher’s responsibility to manage difficult or demanding authors, rather than handing them over to you with a sigh of relief). Be very clear about how you’re prepared to work – if you behave like a doormat, you are more likely to be treated as one. (For instance, you are perfectly entitled to insist on phone-calls and meetings during normal working hours only.) But there is a very important caveat to this: standing up for yourself works only if you are very good at what you do. Otherwise, publishers might simply pick a meeker editor who is easier to push around. Life is not fair.

The following tactic is very satisfying, but not recommended unless you have a truly superb track record: if you are being paid in instalments, and one fails to arrive, walk off the project. Down tools and refuse to pick them up until the money is in your account. If it’s more than a week late, announce your withdrawal from the project, instruct the publisher to appoint a new editor, and prepare a full handover brief. Then follow through. I mean it.

[Author's note: Since I first wrote this piece, it has been pointed out that in case of clients asking you to do work when they haven't yet paid for the last job you did, this is an alternative strategy. If I ever try it, I'll let you know how it turned out.]

What can authors do?

Hand in a polished manuscript. Far too many South African authors, out of timidity, innate sloppiness, ignorance or laziness, hand in manuscripts for editing that resemble the roughest imaginable first-draft stage. Journalists are particularly guilty of this, because they’re used to flinging copy at a subeditor as they race to meet a deadline.

Space doesn’t allow for discussion of how to prepare your MS before sending it out into the world, so I’ll give one golden practical rule: read the entire MS aloud before submitting it for editing. Yes, the whole thing, chapter by chapter (not necessarily all at once). Your lips MUST move. And you must read from a print-out, not your computer screen. All kinds of glaring errors will leap out at you, repetition and sequencing errors will be revealed, all the clunky dialogue will grate on your ear, and you’ll be bored by some of the descriptive or philosophical passages. Now get stuck back into your MS. And before sending it off at last to the editor, remember to run a spell-check – it’s plain bad manners not to.

And speaking of the unmannerly, there are still authors who become indignant at the notion that their work might need editing. Sometimes I encounter the racist assumption that an editor is required only when a black author is involved, but not when the writer’s “first language is English”. (Those who have Afrikaans or isiXhosa or Arabic or Russian as their mother tongues may indeed need their editors to pay careful attention paid to idiom and grammar; but the most flawless command of the English language does not protect against woolly writing or implausible plotting.)

So accept – gracefully – that your MS will need editing, even if (in the words of Margaret Atwood) it feels like “landing face down in a threshing machine”. I believe that there isn’t a writer alive, no matter how celebrated, who doesn’t need their work edited; and of the hundred or so books of all kinds I’ve edited, some by highly respected and award-winning authors, only two so far have qualified for what publishers optimistically refer to as a “light” edit. (Note that if your publisher tells you, “Your MS won’t need much editing, it’s very clean,” they are almost certainly guilty of wishful thinking – especially if you are relatively new on the writing scene.)

Remember: no author is able to be entirely objective about their own work; and most need help in addressing the mysterious, amorphous audience “out there”. It is not easy writing for strangers, for folk we will never know, but whom we need to woo, to convince, to impress, to enthral, to entertain.

A brilliant editor will act as a go-between, a midwife, an emissary, an alchemist in the complex task of turning the solitary act of writing into a text able to speak to multiple readers. There is no author who will not benefit from the ministrations of such a paragon; but such paragons are under threat in a publishing environment that increasingly cannot develop, support or reward excellence.