It was amazing to be reminded just how intense editing fiction can (and should) be. It involves total absorption in someone else’s world. There is no coming up for air, no pausing for a chat, a glass of wine with friends (something utterly necessary to the academic editing ultra-marathon). It’s not a bad analogy: academic editing is like one of those hundred-mile marathons where you proceed at a steady trot, stopping off each night for a hot bath and a bowl of pasta — and fresh socks. The scenery changes day by day, the terrain differs mightily (especially if you’re editing something with multiple authors — some days you’re striding across gentle meadows, some days you’re stumbling over sharp rocks and picking thorns out your legs).

Editing an 80-000 word novel is more like a race over a shorter distance — ten or twenty kays round a track. You can grab a wet towel or water from someone on the sidelines, but you cannot stop to shoot the breeze or wash the dishes. You’re in the same environment the whole time, and that environment is all you can think of.

During my spell in Zoo City, I got total tunnel vision. I found it incredibly difficult to respond to phone-calls, emails, demands from the outside world. I often didn’t even hear the phone ringing, or found myself hitting “reject incoming call” without even thinking. This may be a personal failing or just the way my concentration works.

The crux is that there is a gap between the real world and the world on the page. It’s a given that the real world is more important, but if the world on the page is to work, it requires total immersion. On the last day of editing ZC, a friend rang for help with a CV. We kept arguing about how long they’d been in a certain job, until I realised I was working from a March 2011 calendar — which is when Lauren’s novel is set. It was quite a shock to remember it was still 2010.

So then, a round-up of some thoughts on editing and writing fiction.

When editing fiction, it is your responsibility to enter the writer’s world and head. You may NOT redecorate to your taste. (Neither Lauren’s Moxyland nor Zoo City are H-rated, the latter most especially not. At times, my eyes were watering from the effort not to squeeze them shut, but it was not my job to PG-rate the text.) You are, however, allowed to point out that the back stairs go nowhere, there is no supporting wall holding up the second storey, the characters curl up in front of the cozy fireplace, but no chimney emerges from the roof. In which case, the author must fix the problem, not you. You can prompt, nudge, encourage or suggest: but you may not wheel in your own bricks and cement and start putting in a load-bearing wall.

Immediate sort-of exception to this rule: if your author is experienced, you’re in tune with each other, and they trust you, you can be quite directive about how to tackle gaps. This consists of literally papering the cracks to which your author needs to take a trowel and plaster: you’ll write something like “This transition is too abrupt. How does Thando go from cracking beers in Ellen’s kitchen to falling down the manhole? Can you have him weaving his way drunkenly down the street, back-chatting the local prostitutes while the long-suffering Ellen watches from her front gate?” If your author is gifted, she’ll take the idea of a transition and run with it, so that a drunken Thando might spin round to blow kisses at a passing beauty and take a tumble in the process. Or start walking backwards, waving at Ellen, ignoring her warning shouts. Or… you get the picture.

This, of course, isn’t line-editing — the business of taking a manuscript and running it through the grammar, spell and consistency check machine. There are lots of different words for this editing approach in the industry — some call it manuscript development, some development editing, some copy-editing. All I know is that it’s what I do.

Some years ago Michael Titlestad took issue with the way some local first-time writers were being edited. I certainly don’t agree with everything he said (his piece was suggestive of the diffused light found in ivory towers), but one thing he wrote is worth tattooing on all publishers and authors’ foreheads:

…before copyediting and proofreading, writers need … to labour over revisions. They need to fashion the best and most compelling narrative they can. The best literary editors guide authors, especially new authors, down this path of frustration and travail.

The point is that the editor or the publisher often needs to return a novel – especially a first novel – to its author for rewriting. Substantive rewriting. With copious instructions and a map of the way. And you hold their hand and chivvy them and cheerlead them while they do this. Then you make them do it again. And again. And sometimes yet again. Only then do you start line-editing. Zoo City travelled the cyberwaves between Lauren and myself umpteen times before we were both satisfied. It was already a gem, but we were determined to polish every single facet.

The problem comes when you return something that needs a lot of work to a gifted but inexperienced author. (This was NOT the case with Lauren, who picked up every useful suggestion and responded with flair and speed. She also knows by now exactly when to ignore me.) For a newbie, instructions like “rewrite” or “promising, but needs work” or “cut substantially” are hopelessly vague. I’ve seen second attempts that are worse than the raw but feisty originals: rewrites are often longer than the original (usually an indicator that you’re going in the wrong direction), dialogue has become more formal, the text has been padded with yet more adverbs, adjectives and metaphors, and the latter have been lovingly polished while the pace languishes.

So for everyone in this position, this is what every (good) fiction editor wants their author to know:

1. Ditch the notion that every word you write is precious. Those lines of type marching across your screen? Raw material only (yes, this is a business where you put in months of labour just to create the raw material). Don’t even think of confusing this with the finished product. What you have at this point is a block of wood or marble from which you are going to sculpt something fine and rare. Now start chiseling.

2. Same goes for even the most brilliant, original and creative metaphors and images. If they distract from the action taking place in the sentence, toss them. Don’t expect your reader to stop in the middle of a car-chase to admire the scenery.

3. Your fictional world has to obey much stricter rules of internal logic and consistency than the real world (aka the Mike Nicol rule, aka the John Lanchester rule). In real life, the unimaginable happens all the time, wildly improbable coincidences occur daily, and characters are much larger than life. This is seldom tolerated in fiction.

4. Corollary to the above: if you are taking real life and turning it into fiction, you will probably have to tone real life right down. However, don’t ever mess with the facts. Readers get very beady-eyed about this. For instance, don’t set your novel in autumn and then have a character listening to the call of a bird that sings only in spring.

5. Numbers 3 and 4 apply especially strictly if you are writing magic realism/sci-fi/fantasy. Your fantastical world has to follow its own internal rules as rigidly as tramlines. If you establish that your heroine is a mind-reader in Chapter 1, do not have her gazing at her lover, wondering what he’s thinking, in Chapter 9. Or if you do, you need to create a water-tight exemption to your rule first. Which can look clumsy.

6. Another way that fiction differs from real life: there should be some measure of closure. Wrap up the loose plot threads — not all of them, especially not if you have a series in mind. But you want to avoid too many questions trailing in the reader’s mind.

7. Beware of purple prose, of dense lyrical passages, no matter how exquisite. Modern readers want to know what happens next — the era of lingering for two pages on the cry of the peacock in the Moghul gardens at dusk has passed. (Personally, I think this is a pity, but only the famous are permitted this luxury these days.) Rather sprinkle aesthetic sugar throughout with a restrained and even hand.

8. Readers enjoy characters with whom they can identify. Your hero or heroine should be sympathetic. Failing that, they should be compelling. A few very good writers can get away with creating a central narrative character who is repulsive or alienating, but it might not be wise to assume you are one of them.

Circling back to the editor/author relationship, it is essential that you actually have such a thing. Some publishers (none that I know of in this country, thank goodness) believe that there should be no contact between author and editor, much less dialogue and debate. You don’t have to like each other, but mutual respect is essential. There has to be a certain chemistry. This is what makes the total greater than the sum of the parts. (Over on his Facebook page, Louis Greenberg says: “Editors are shinks with a lower hourly rate.” Yes indeedy.)

A final insider PS via Elinor Sisulu (who recently chaired the judges’ panel for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize): When there are very, very strong contenders for a literary prize, and the books vying for the prize are truly equally brilliant, guess what one of the deciding factors is? How well the book has been edited. (How can you tell? A good novel that’s also been beautifully edited reads effortlessly, with no “fat” or excess verbiage, no typos or silly and sloppy mistakes, no unevenness, and an overall sense of polish, flow and clarity.)

*Rustum takes a fortifying swig as Helen twirls like a dervish*

“The One! The Only! Rustum Kozaaaaaain!” *poet narrowly avoids a klap*

Eina. Is it safe to open my eyes now?

So here’s a guide, designed to make it as painless (and hopefully inexpensive) as possible.

Getting hold of my debut poetry collection, Strange Fruit, can involve a few hoops. There ARE branches of both Exclusives and Wordsworth that stock it (in Cape Town, both the Waterfront and Cavendish branches of EB have it). You’ll need to be very firm with those that don’t: order it, and refuse to take “No” for an answer. Supply all the details: title, my name (spelled correctly — I have lost count of the times bored sales-clerks, bullied by me into searching their databases, have announced triumphantly: “We have nothing by Moffat/Moffit/Mrrfitz on the system”) and ISBN/EAN if possible.

I realise this involves more determination and organization that most are prepared to invest, so take the easy route: send wonderful super-duper where-would-we-be-without-them Book Lounge an email, or give them a call. They will promptly send a copy anywhere in the world, hassle-free. What’s more, they’ll send you a signed copy if you ask for one. Alternatively, you could try www.kalahari.net — Strange Fruit isn’t on their system at the moment, but this is apparently being rectified. Kalk Bay Books, another grand indie bookstore, stocks it AND lets you order online. If all else fails, write to me or Colleen Higgs, my publisher — here the advantage is that we really, truly, deeply want you to buy the book. Americans have the advantage of the Scribd/Little White Bakkie system that enables them to buy the e-book. But (marketing ploy alert) the hard copy, with its fruity pink and dark chocolate cover, makes a great Valentine’s Day pressie — plus it contains erotica (it’s a Very Rude Book, according to my mother).

And while we’re talking about erotica, a word in favour of a much-loved stepchild book in which I have a story: Open, an erotic anthology by South African women writers. With a rather retiring cover, this glorious book never really got the kudos it deserved, although it did have a glittering and glam launch. It’s a literary tour de force, with a host of prize-winning writers contributing, including Caine Prize winners Henrietta Rose-Innes and Mary Watson. But this doesn’t compromise the raunch. Or the fun: male readers reported laughing their heads off, as well as taking notes. Use bulldozer tactics when ordering it from your local bookshop, or order it direct from Random House Struik. Or click here to get it from loot (at a rather nice price); and here to get it with ebucks via kalahari. Also a good Ballyhootine’s Day present.

And now a word for my beloved orphan book, Lovely Beyond Any Singing: shortly after it came out, the imprint was mothballed. The memory still causes hair-tearing. Nevertheless, while the books doze mostly undisturbed in a large warehouse in Ottery, sales limp on (it sells very sparingly but steadily to homesick Saffers abroad), and two bookshops in the entire country — Clarens’s The Bibliophile and our very own Book Lounge — keep it in stock. I strongly suspect it might be in line for pulping, but here’s some good news: it’s currently available from kalahari at an impressively low price — so low as to preclude me getting any royalties, so I have no ulterior motives in encouraging you to buy it. Everyone who has ever lived in this incredibly beautiful country, or who plans to travel to it, NEEDS to buy this book. Really.

The cricket book, aka Bob Woolmer’s Art and Science of Cricket, is perhaps the easiest to get hold of, with its own dedicated website and independent distributors in the UK, North America (including the Caribbean), India, Australia and New Zealand. Amazon does a steady trade in it, at a discount that once again pretty much precludes the authors getting any royalties, but what matters is that this labour of love and incredibly special memorial to Bob gets around. This is also the only book of mine that’s generally available in most bookshops. The price might give you pause — but remember it’s a hardcover illustrated behemoth of nearly 700 pages, and is a very good deal, esp as a Christmas or birthday present.

For those who want something they can pick up without straining, cricket-lovers in the UK can now buy paperback versions of the batting and bowling chapters: these will be released as separate books in March and can be pre-ordered via Amazon. (Ignore the dreadful descriptions of the books — I have been promised that these will be replaced with the final book blurbs, although Amazon seems to be taking its sweet time about updating them.)

I assume that anyone who wants to get Seasons Come to Pass, my university-level textbook on poetry, can do so fairly easily, and indeed, you can get it here, here and here. I’m very fond of this book, and non-students say they also enjoy it.

My academic stuff is more specialist, and I doubt whether many of you will be banging on counters demanding these titles, but here are some web links nonetheless:
Partners in change: Working with men to end gender-based violence, a UN-INSTRAW publication in which I have a chapter (this was so badly edited as to compromise the content, so on the off-chance anyone is interested, you might want to ask me for the original version);
Advancing Refugee Protection in South Africa, published by Berghahn Books and available as an e-book — I’ve co-authored a chapter on women refugees;
Women’s Activism in South Africa, for some reason much cheaper at loot than anywhere else online, plus I spotted a stack of copies at the Book Lounge — or you can just read my chapter here;
New South African Keywords, in which I wrote the section on gender (surprise). This is indeed a handy addition to your library, and packs a lot of punch for a such a little book. Very sharp, but not so academic as to be intimidating.

PS: In researching this post, I found that book websites do some rather weird things. According to kalahari, the readership for Lovely Beyond Any Singing (a book with something for everyone) is “undergraduate”, which is news to me. And to my annoyance, Amazon has downgraded me on all the cricket books from “author” to “contributor”. I imagine this is a reflection of the deep-rooted assumption that a woman can’t possibly have written a book about cricket, encapsulated when radio presenter (and usually flawless interviewer) John Maytham announced on Capetalk radio: “Tom Eaton did a great job of writing this book with Bob Woolmer and Tim Noakes, and Helen Moffett helped with the editing.” Er no, John, it was the other way round, and I’d spent quite some time on air explaining this to you.

I’ve been meaning for two decades to write down the parallel events that took place in my life on that day. A Joburg friend had put me on a Greyhound bus the evening before, calling anxiously, “Phone when you get there so I know you haven’t crashed.” I was an innocent in those days: “Whoever heard of a Greyhound bus crashing?” I said (a stupidly portentous thing to say if this was a work of fiction, which it isn’t).

Round about 4am on 2 February, I woke to a loud bang and a lurch. One muffled scream, then I was hurtling through the air along with flying bits of overhead luggage. Then I hit my seat again, and for a long moment of disbelief, assumed we had a puncture. Then the sobbing began, and I realised the bus was leaning at a peculiar angle.

I got up in the dark, peering round for the cabin attendants. Next I called out, asking if there was a doctor on board. No response. A nurse? No response. Okay, surely there was a first-aid kit on board? I began to inch my way down the tilted aisle in the dark. Broken glass crunched underfoot. I got to the doors, twisted closed, and began to realise the enormity of our predicament – we’d need an axe to get off the bus. Plus I was starting to worry about fire.

I found one of the Greyhound stewardesses crouched in the stairwell. I asked her what the procedure was for emergencies: where was the first-aid box, the fire extinguisher?

“Don’t talk to me about fucking Greyhound, I’ve resigned as of this minute,” she wailed, crystals glinting in her hair. We both thought it was glass – later we realised it was sugar. She’d been making herself a cup of tea when nemesis struck.

Then someone in uniform stepped forward. Friedrich was in the Air Force. In all that chaos, he was a vision of sanity, the braid on his uniform and cap gleaming along with his white-blond hair. “We have to get these people out of here,” he said. A wiry, dark-haired guy rose from the ruined seats. He was an officer with the Paras, and was bending the rules by travelling back to camp in civvies. His name was Rolf, and he wanted to help.

It goes without saying that Friedrich and Rolf were white, but not everyone on the bus was. The tides of the old South Africa had been creeping out imperceptibly, and a third of the passengers were black. Next, Brandon, who was coloured, joined us, also impeccably turned out in uniform. He was part of the Presidential guard, and deeply worried that he might not reach Cape Town in time to march at the opening of Parliament.

For the next aeon, the four of us cleared people off the bus, carrying some of them when necessary, literally posting them through the windows, now gaping empty. That’s probably what caused most of the superficial cuts and bleeding. The moon had set, and we couldn’t see to avoid the jags of glass still in the frames.

I was a member of the End Conscription Campaign, and I had never expected to be grateful for army training, but in the early hours of that morning, I was beyond thankful. Rolf, Friedrich and Brandon worked like automatons, firm, practical, swift.

We found the other stewardess weeping under a seat, with what seemed to be a broken arm, but she was able to tell us there was no first-aid kit on board. No axe, no emergency protocol, no fire extinguisher either. We ended up tearing the little onboard pillows into strips for bandages. We did it so easily then, but you try tearing up a pillow-slip.

We kept expecting to find horrors, but no-one seemed to be terribly injured. Shock was the biggest problem, especially among the more elderly passengers. We were constantly detaching hands that clutched, at us, at seats, at anything stable.

When everyone was out, we clambered out the windows into a scene from Dante’s Purgatorio: moaning people rambling around in the blackness. This was a pre-cellphone era. We were alone in the middle of the Great Karoo, at an ungodly hour of the morning. Help was a very long way off.

Friedrich and I went round to look at the front of the bus: the driver’s section had concertina-ed into a crumple of metal maybe two foot wide. Worse, black liquid seeped from the area. We looked at each other in horror: we knew we had to try and get the driver out. Friedrich stuck a hand in gingerly – another indicator of how times have changed, the risk of HIV-infection never even crossed our minds. He couldn’t feel a body, so we decided to try again when it was lighter – dawn wasn’t that far away.

What we discovered when the blackness began to lift was that the bus-driver had been thrown clear, and was lying unconscious in the veld. Meanwhile, a bakkie stopped – the first car to pass in the 45 minutes since the crash. The driver, appalled by the scene he found, agreed to drive hell-for-leather to the nearest town and rustle up the police and ambulances. Brandon begged a ride – he had six hours left to get to Cape Town and Parliament – and shook hands with our small team before disappearing into the grey.

As it got lighter, we were able to organize people into groups, placing more competent and uninjured people in charge, sharing out fruit juice and water salvaged from the wreck. Unbelievably, few seemed to be seriously injured, but there were some nasty cuts and people were becoming extremely emotional as the shock wore off. We were worried about concussion and internal injuries – it was impossible to tell whether crying or catatonic people were badly hurt or not.

I had my first physical reaction when the rising sun revealed the state of the bus. It lay across a donga at a 60-degree angle, with the entire undercarriage peeled back. It had rained earlier that night, softening the soil, so that the donga had acted as a brake into which the bus had sunk, instead of somersaulting. I was suddenly desperate to vomit, but then Rolf set up a glad cry. The doctor from the nearest small town had arrived, slewing his car to a stop, and running towards us with his medical bag.

As the light became more pitiless, more and more help arrived, including the ambulance (all the way from Beaufort West, 150 kms away), police from three Karoo towns, concerned citizens. The bus-driver, the stewardess with the suspected fracture, a backpacker with a horrible scalp wound, some students with bad cuts and contusions, and the more distressed elderly folk were whisked away first. The rescue fleet made four trips back and forth, gallantly taking the non-injured on a “ladies first” basis. But I refused to be parted from Friedrich and Rolf, my comrades in blood and arms: “We’re a team,” we declared. Everyone was eventually decanted at the local hospital, in the nearest small town, where the more badly hurt were stabilised before being sent on to better medical facilities further on down the N1.

But now we had a new problem. The hospital was racially segregated, and the seriously injured bus-driver was being carried round to the “Nie-blankes” ward. We were outraged. One tannie with a tight perm was particularly incensed: “We were all in this together, how can they separate us now?” The local hotel owner had no such strictures: we were all welcome back at the hotel, hot food would be served, we could take baths and rest until a replacement coach was sent.

Friedrich, Rolf and I went from bed to bed collecting phone numbers and messages. We agreed that I’d place the calls. Unbelievable as this may seem to the Twitter generation, no-one knew about the crash yet. Greyhound had no 24-hour emergency number, and I had to wait till office hours to call them, getting the runaround first from the switchboard, then from a dragon secretary: “He’s in a meeting, can I take a message?”

The tiny town had a manual exchange. There were no public phones. The hospital let me use their single phone on condition all the calls charges were reversed. To make a call, I would pick up the receiver and crank a handle until I raised the operator. They then had to call the operator in whatever town I was trying to reach, and persuade them to make a call to a specific number, where whoever answered had to agree to accept the charges before I could be connected. Most of the people I was trying to reach were already at work, so I was trying, via operators, to place reverse charge calls through switchboards, some of which hung up the minute the request was made. Remembering it, I take back every nasty thing I’ve ever said about cellphones.

Friedrich and Rolf were proverbial towers of strength. They didn’t slacken so much as their postures until everyone was comfortable, their relatives informed, the more seriously injured en route to hospitals in bigger towns, and everyone else ferried to the hotel. At some point, one of them pointed out a huge bump on my head. I probed and yelped, but didn’t want to harass the already swamped medical staff. I decided, with a casualness that appalls me in retrospect, to wait until I got back to Cape Town before going to a hospital.

At last we were done. The local constable drove us to the hotel, where round-eyed staff cooked us a mammoth late breakfast. The three of us were high, babbling. We kept toasting with tea and thick moerkoffie in even thicker cups.

We also found the townsfolk had driven to the bus, cleared out all the luggage they could find, and brought it back to the hotel lobby. Some things were missing (including my handbag), but this act of kindness meant a great deal. In a quiet, dusty room with an elderly enamel bath, I realised for the first time that my clothes were splashed with blood. Bending to open my rescued suitcase, a spasm shot through my back, the first intimation that something was wrong.

Back in the musty lounge with Marmite-coloured walls, I became aware of the burble of the radio coming from the bar. A student at Wits, a tiny intense Jewish girl, asked if I wanted to come and listen to the news. Quite a few passengers were keen to know if our accident a news item yet, but the bar was dense with smoke, and I was finding it hard to move. Rolf and Friedrich stayed with me, solicitous, bringing glasses of water.

There was a commotion from the bar. I assumed we’d made the lunchtime news. Maya, the Wits student, burst into the lounge, her face alight: “FW’s unbanned the ANC!” she screamed. “He’s going to free Mandela!”

Our trio was on its feet, roaring. I was ecstatic, weeping, my new comrades seized with rage and dismay. Friedrich, aghast at the enormity of the betrayal, kept shouting “No way! The fucking verraier!” Rolf, face twisted, was yelling, “It’s a good thing! Now we can kill the fuckers openly! Now we can go to war properly, not with one hand behind our backs.”

There was a long moment when we all looked at each other. There was still blood under Friedrich’s fingernails. They drew together, then away from me as if I smelled bad.

All through the long day we waited for a replacement coach, all through the long journey back home, my back now frighteningly sore, every jolt a knife, they refused to speak to me again.

In the papers the following day, the headlines, in enormous fonts, read ANC UNBANNED. Our accident was relegated to a paragraph somewhere on an inside page. The driver, who saved our lives by keeping his head after a tyre burst, had a ruptured spleen, along with multiple fractures. I was told he was doing well following surgery.

I suffered a compression fracture that turned my fifth lumbar vertebra into a handful of fragments, and spent the next decade shuttling in and out of doctors’ and physiotherapists’ offices. Greyhound offered no compensation whatsoever for medical expenses incurred. I grumbled until Tim Noakes explained the mechanics of my injury: I had hit the roof of the bus head-first so hard that the stress of the impact had travelled down my spine, finally imploding my vertebra and exiting that way. Apparently, if I hadn’t been asleep and completely relaxed, either my skull would have caved in, or the impact would have escaped via one of my cervical vertebrae, rendering me quadriplegic. I stopped whingeing after that. But I still wonder if Greyhound now has seatbelts in its coaches.

That day, the ANC was unbanned, along with the PAC and the SACP. That day, this country turned in its path and set its feet another way – and Nelson Mandela began packing a suitcase. That day, Brandon marched to a session of Parliament that would lead to his getting the right not just to die for his country, but to vote for its government. That day marked the end of my youth, and the beginning of something huge, new and still unfolding.

And to get the year off to a fine and sparkling start, we are gathering at Caffe Neo (remember? opposite the Mouille Point lighthouse) to honour the achievements of Book SA’s very own Sophy “Imago” Kohler. Who now holds the degree of BA with distinction, and also gained a distinction for English. Yay Sophy!

It has been pointed out that failure to mark this milestone with cake and bubbles would be remiss in the extreme. We also need to drink to Sophy’s meteoric rise as a Young Whippersnapper.

So — yes, we are springing this on you — leap down to Neo’s THIS THURSDAY at 4pm. Bring vuvuzelas (well, maybe not) and other items suitable for singing Sophy’s praises. The wearing of academic gowns is optional, and there may be speeches. It depends on how much champagne is consumed.

RSVP via this thread, please!

“We’ll meet again, we know where, we know whe-en…”

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 John van der Ruit – 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, Tom Eaton, 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 not ever 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 has gone 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 the gym, 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.

They are the oddest couple. My father is a devout Christian; my mother a proselytising atheist. My sisters and I grew up to cries of “When we die, we rot!” (Bertrand Russell) as my father packed us into the car to take us to Sunday school. My mother manages to say something simultaneously wicked and wickedly funny every five minutes; my father says something mildly derogatory about once a year, and then we all faint with shock.

During the 50 years of their marriage, they agreed on the following: a teetotal home (which meant that in the hard-drinking white suburbs of my childhood, they did almost no socialising); no TV in the house until the youngest child had matriculated; animals came first (a friend still talks about the time she came to lunch and the humans got tomato sandwiches while the cats had chicken); books and music were as essential as breathing; education was sacred; soft drinks were the anti-Christ (their suspicion of sugar, along with their quaint notion that if a child wanted to go somewhere like, oh, the other side of town, they could walk or cycle, is possibly the only reason I’m not diabetic today); country was better than town; green ethics ruled (we were environmentalists long before the word was in common parlance). Frugality was necessitated by the fact that we never had any money (by middle-class standards), and it became a life-long habit. It shocks my parents that I eat in restaurants, for instance.

They disagree on absolutely everything else. My sisters and I have described their marriage as “fifty years of amicable bicker”. When asked how they would like to celebrate their golden wedding anniversary, they said they saw no reason for any kind of party. When pushed, my father said he would like a Thanksgiving Mass in the Bethlehem Cathedral. My mother said would we please make a donation to the local SPCA in their name.

However, a plethora of cousins and uncles and aunts decided that my parents were having a golden wedding party whether they liked it or not, and plans were made to descend on the Moffett smallholding in a ravishingly beautiful and remote corner of the eastern Free State, about 20 kms from Golden Gate as the crow flies (and my mother does indeed have a semi-tame crow). I got a ride up with a friend and encountered my mother’s garden(s) at its most glorious. Spread over about four acres, she has created: swathes of grasses, landscaped down to the dam; a kitchen garden, a vegetable garden, two arboretums (in autumn, the forest of silver birch and liquid amber, gold and mercury quivering and rippling, brings tears to my eyes); a cosmos field, a white garden, a medieval garden complete with moon gates made from local sandstone, a secret garden (a massive oval entirely surrounded by high honeysuckle and privet hedges; you enter via tiny little gates and come out into this dazzle of climbing roses — thousands upon thousands, all scented, shaded from palest pink to deepest red — enclosing swathes of irises and poppies and clouds of fennel and ginger-mint), a pergola garden, water-meadows and more. The neighbours all thought my parents were barking when they hired a bulldozer to put an island into the dam, but now it has herons (six different kinds), otters, crabs, endless birds… my parents have done all this organically. Not a single pesticide or fertilizer other than manure has ever sullied their property. My mother carefully collects snails by hand and releases them next to the dam. As a result, their small patch of heaven positively wriggles with wildlife; whenever I go jogging, duikers and African hares spring out on all sides. We’ve had visits from genets, brown hyena and the incredibly rare aardwolf.

But I digress. At the sumptuous anniversary lunch — entirely catered, down to the cutlery, crockery, condiments and drink — by kind relatives, my dad said a Latin grace and quoted John Donne from memory. I repeated the famous anecdote about Lady Longford, who, when asked on her 60th wedding anniversary if she had ever considered divorce, replied “Divorce? Never! Murder — frequently.”

But there were no prosy words in the end, so I resorted to a poem. Both my parents have their “own” poems in Strange Fruit, but the one I chose mentions both of them, as well as the farm. So here it is:

Libra Rising

The last time I visited the farm,
you shook me awake at some witching hour,
excited as a child before Christmas;
chivvied me into a dressing-gown
and Wellington boots, waving a torch:
“I want to show you something,” you said:
Muffled, muddled with dreams, yet trusting,
I tromped out after you, crunching across
the frosted garden decked in silence and silver;
down through the gate, towards the dam,
the longer grass now swishing.

The moon had set,
leaving the constellations holding court
in a sky molten with pouring stars.
“Look,” you said, pointing towards the ridge
beneath the dense swirl of the Milky Way,
“You can see Libra rising.”
And there it was: perfect.
Like those swooping
V-shapes that signify seagulls
in old-fashioned illustrations.

Back in the house, the kitchen
warmth a delicious reminder
of how cold we’d been outside;
you heated milk with vanilla,
enough for my father as well,
when he trundled in, fogged with sleep,
to ask what we womenfolk were up to;
married to you long enough to
grunt in understanding, find it normal
that you’d get up and go out on
a winter’s night, just to look at the stars –
and want to share them with your daughter.

I submitted a clutch of poems — all written in the last five years, and subsequently stringently edited (I hacked out all the undergrowth) — and it interests me that Ingrid chose three that are all memorials in some way. At the moment, I’m trying to write an essay on the experiences I had working with Bob Woolmer and Tim Noakes, and what they taught me about sport as drama, narrative, art and even tragedy; and only as I was editing the last poem for Ingrid, originally written after my trip-cum-pilgrimage to the Cricket World Cup in the Caribbean, that I realised it was for and about Bob — if it ever gets included in another collection,* I’ll dedicate it to him.

*Another poetry collection? Curses curses wot am I saying…

For a woman who befriended me after she died

Tall candle of a woman,
dark nimbus of hair around
a face like a flame:
four weeks after your festive nuptials
(“the happiest day of my life,” you said)
a dam burst in that beautiful head.
You died in your husband’s arms,
for which crumb of mercy we were thankful.
The wedding guests regathered, ashen
our dancing shoes now following your coffin.

It was only after your death
I really came to know you: arm’s length in life,
you came closer, whispering in my ear:
“Write thank-you letters at once.”
“Double the quantity of chocolate in recipes.”
“Lightning can strike at any time.”
“Have a day to remember.”
“Love is worth the risk.”

Those who loved, still love you,
locked their fingers together
and stumbled on:
now you are the one being left behind –
nothing so ruthless, merciful
as the passage of time.
But I still hear snatches of your voice:
“Don’t let your fear of the water
stop you from learning to swim.”

In loving memory of Liesl Abrahams Steyn

Lesson from the Gospel

Last night he grabbed my breast,
jerked my hair, called me a whore;
this morning he kneels in church,
eyes shut, hands devout in prayer.
This diptych is no stranger to God’s house:
first, the outrages raining on egg-shell flesh
and reeling ears; next, the pose of public piety.

These events transpired half a life ago.
No helplines then, no thought of blaming
anyone but myself.

But God helps those who help themselves;
like countless others, I survived.
While church, state and law all looked aside,
I harvested a rustling crop of rage:
as a child who tilts a bubbling pot knows pain –
I’d know the stink of whitened sepulchre again.

St. Patrick’s, Bridgetown

Mass at seven a.m. (later is too hot),
the stone church whirring with fans,
the casual birds clapping their wings,
as they coast from pillar to post,
settling for the Gospel and sermon.
This is no little England –
the stained-glass too suggestive
of luminous sea, sudden dawns and dusks.
The velvet priest has a voice as warm
as the air, soft, humid, pressing on skin.
Old ladies in hats, faces seamed as toffees
amble from bosom friend to friend,
to offer the sign of the peace;
and the king of love our shepherd is.

Exiled from home for three long months,
in this most unexpected and faraway place,
something unknots, and loss tears through at last.

I can also pretty much guarantee that I’ll loathe any “hero” who pants to get into the pants of children or teenage girls half his age (Lolita, which I couldn’t finish, made my skin crawl). And I can’t see the point of novels about heroes/anti-heroes who sexually harass their students/colleagues/servants/slaves, commit statutory or any other kind of rape, or resort to prostitutes.

For the rest, it gets very blurry. I can’t take too much gore, and I’m squeamish about excessive descriptions of body fluids. I don’t like any kind of writing with an undertone of misogyny (more common in the “great” 20th-century writers than you might think), and fictional accounts or memoirs of child abuse don’t go down very well either — the research I’ve done in this field has annihilated my ability to read anything other than the driest statistical, legal and medical reports.

I’ve said before that I’m shamelessly prelapsarian; what I need when reading about great trauma or evil is a narrative of redemption, or failing that, transcendence. This was considered terribly infra dig when I was a graduate student; I was first suspected of being a Leavisite, but thanks to my feminist rants, I was soon left alone (rather the way a herd will shun the rabid animal in its midst).

Years later, I sat listening to Susan Sontag give a lecture at UCT shortly before her death. She made no bones about it: for her, the only point to art of any kind was its potential to address imaginatively questions of moral action and redemption. I almost rushed forward to prostrate myself at her feet.

So no misery for the sake of closely observed misery. But this doesn’t mean that I can handle only writing that promises rainbows after the storm. The wonder of books is that I keep finding authors that describe the most appalling suffering, but enthrall me nonetheless. For them, I might even tolerate a few animals being caught up in the general maelstrom, although I’ve learnt how to spot such passages and skip them.

In this category, I’ve recently read two exceptional books about cataclysmic suffering, and the regeneration that creeps out of the ruins left by human violence, greed and stupidity. They are The Poisonwood Bible (by Barbara Kingsolver) and The Book Thief (by Markus Zusak).

The Poisonwood Bible is worth a hundred academic studies on the colonial and post-colonial history of Africa, the Congo in particular. I get exasperated with Kingsolver when she starts moralising (as she does towards the end), but the extraordinary thing she does in this book is show — with incredible beauty and power — how those who come to Africa from elsewhere are utterly and permanently altered by their interaction with our continent. The more determined her characters are to make some kind of “impact” on Africa, the more profoundly Africa claims and shapes them. It’s a narrative that runs deliberately counter to Heart of Darkness. As her characters are woven inextricably into the turbulence of the Congo in the 1960s and beyond, they find light and humanity and love — and even a sense of belonging — rather than Conrad’s “horror”.

The Book Thief is gorgeous, even though it deals with the fate of ordinary working-class Germans during World War II, in particular, one apparently unremarkable family which risks everything to shelter a Jew. Not a new story, you may think, especially as the heroine of the title is a little girl — but this no fictional version of Anne Frank’s story. It’s original and even funny, with an unusual narrator, a contrary love story or two (the tenderness between the book thief and her foster-father will make you weep), and through it all, an obsession with books and reading. (According to Wikipedia, it’s being sold as a “young adult” book in the US. I smell a marketing ploy.)

But there are other books to which my responses are far more complicated. I am trying to read When A Crocodile Eats The Sun by Peter Godwin (his harrowing and tautly written account of his family’s efforts to survive as Mugabe’s Zimbabwe implodes around them), and it’s agonising. I’m reading it because a recurring (real) character in the book is my darling friend Keith, who appears on the first page, who helps the Godwins find a resting-place for the ashes of Peter’s sister Jain, who has told me many of the same stories that appear on Godwin’s pages.

When I got to the part where Keith tells Peter he’ll never leave Zimbabwe (where a long line of ancestors and his twin brother are buried), I cried so hard, tears flew out of my nose. Keith had no choice in the end; love renders us all vulnerable. Just as the Godwin’s domestic worker, generously pensioned off, returned with local goons, forced to demand a bribe, so did Keith’s housekeeper. In her case, the threat was blackmail; Keith and his partner could be arrested for homosexuality. So they were forced to pack up and move to Cape Town (where, incidentally, they were at last able to marry — pause to be proudly South African for a moment). Keith is homesick every day of his life.

For Keith’s sake, I have managed to get three-quarters of the way through this book (skipping everything that looked even remotely animal-related). Godwin is a superb writer — you have to admire someone who describes summer cicadas as “Nature’s tinnitus”. But I’m not sure I can go on, partly because there can be no possible redemption, either in the book or on the immediate horizon for Zimbabwe.

I’ve also just finished The Worst Date Ever, by Jane Bussmann. At first glance, definitely not H-rated. Lots of bodily fluids, a good sprinkling of rape and torture, child soldiers, one breathtakingly un-PC observation after another. But the story of how Jane went from being a celebrity journalist to tracking down war criminals in Northern Uganda, if not uplifting in any conventional sense, is ultimately a cheering read, not least because of the glorious savagery with which the author rips into both the Hollywood schleb culture and the African aid racket. Imagine a piranha who never stops taking the piss. Plus it’s a most original (if weird and one-sided) love story, and the hero is the Real Deal (I googled him — he is not made up, something I first wondered about).

While taking breaks from Godwin’s book:

For light relief, I gobbled up Zukiswa Wanner’s The Madams. Worth it for the “Siz, get your gun” scene alone (where one of the characters finds her man in flagrante). Pure lekker local chick lit, like eating chakalaka chips. Also, courtesy of Karina, I’ve read the first two books in the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer (she who writes with a thesaurus one hand) and Wishful Drinking (Carrie Fisher). The latter is a very good warm-up for the Jane Bussmann book, an irreverent memoir-cum-stand-up routine that’s required reading for Star Wars fans (the real Star Wars flicks, not those messy expensive prequels).

Karina is mesmerized by the Twilight books; Sarah L read the first one, and said it was so bad, it made her eyes bleed. I think both are right. First of all, Ms Meyer is Desperately In Need of an Editor (does she care? She does not. She and her publishers have made enough money to be invulnerable). She throws words at the page in the most approximate fashion, with every other idiom mangled. She never uses a simple verb if she can find a synonym: her characters don’t laugh, they “snicker”, “chuckle”, “snort”, and so on. Repetition? Chuck it on with a trowel.

But I think I understand her astonishing appeal. She gets just how intensely, desperately serious the feelings of teenagers are. For those who remember the agonies and ecstasies of first love, the life-or-death seriousness of it all, how we raged at patronizing parents who said we would “get over” our heartbreak, the mantra “You don’t understand!” — here’s a writer who really DOES understand. She earnestly likens her rather soggy heroine’s boy troubles (do I go with the vampire or the werewolf? Like I really really really love the vampire, but the werewolf is my buddy, and he’s cute too) to the travails of Romeo and Juliet. At length. She has not an ironic or satiric cell in her body. Anyone at the mercy of their emotions can read this safe in the knowledge that they Will Not Be Mocked. Meyer understands that for teenagers, to love is to be heroic, star-crossed, deathless and at risk of dying for love all at once.

Aluta continua: Daddy’s Girl

To loop back to the local scene, I am also trying to read Margie Orford’s latest Clare Hart thriller, Daddy’s Girl. This is NOT H-rated. It deals with child abduction (which makes the Helenometer jangle in alarm), and after a few pages, I had to stop and have a stiff drink. Then I braced myself and started again. Margie and I care passionately about the same causes; we both support Rape Crisis in our professional and personal capacities. So I almost feel I owe it to the Dame, who has always tried to give the disappeared and the silenced a voice, to pay attention to how she does this in her fiction writing. As an editor and reader, I can tell you this: the lady can do plot. And how. From an H-rating perspective, however, this is a bumpy ride. It’s literally too close to home. For instance, when Margie describes Dr Ruth Lyndall in the morgue, I flash straight to Lorna Martin (quite simply the most heroic woman I know). Too many of the characters, the victims, are all too real to me. But this is obviously a personal issue, not a literary one. Margie, I think I’m going to trust you to make things right in the end, and carry on reading.

It’s a strange thing, being besotted with two little sentient beings with non-opposable thumbs and hunting instincts. Even stranger that I continually want to parade them in all their gorgeousness for the rest of the world to see. It was their first birthday that prompted me to post my first blog piece. And it was the thought of being able to put up an entire album of their first two years that tipped the balance in favour of Facebook. (Yes, I succumbed. But when you see this album, you’ll agree it was worth it to launch this much beauty into cyberspace.)

Without my cats, I would be a much lonelier and far more isolated person. And I’m not just referring to the glad welcome I get when I come home, the hours they spend curled up at my feet when I’m meeting deadlines, their purring presence in the night, their uncanny radar when I’m distressed. Because of my desire to share the objects of my affection with others, I have gone out onto the interwebs. Where I have found people — real, live, flesh-and-blood ones. Heroes and friends and even catsitters.

I joined BookSA (and now Facebook) for proper, grown-up reasons (marketing presence), for silly reasons (curiosity) and because they’re a pretty sensible outlet for a freelancer with broadband who works alone. But both times, the prompt was that my darlings had a birthday coming up, and I wanted to tell the world (well, the book-reading world) that I was the luckiest catmother ever.

So, at least partly because of the catalysing power of my angelic little monsters, I have:
* met Ingrid Wolfaardt, Ted Botha, Phakama Mbonambi, Louis Greenberg, Petina Gappah, Fiona Snyckers, Zukisa Wanner, Amitabh Mitra, Tsireledzo Mushona (hey, where are you, Ms Mushona? I miss the antics of Cherie and Lulu) and many, many more…
* had the courage to introduce myself to the likes of Victor Dlamini, Alexandra Fuller, Vikas Swarup and Max du Preez
* drunk fuel-tanker loads of tea with (variously) Karina Brink, Alex Smith, Sven Eick, Rustum Kozain, Sally Partridge (not to mention the buckets of champagne I’ve downed with Sarah Lotz…)
* come to like and admire folk I’ve never laid eyes on in the flesh (Richard de Nooy, Siphiwo Mahala, Ingrid Andersen, the stalwart crew at Writers Get Together, among others)
* been able to collaborate on fun writing projects with Sophy Kohler, Karina, Phakama and Louis
* stumbled across a missing part of my childhood courtesy of Anne Landsman
* gotten myself a website designer
* inadvertently hosted the 2008 BookSA Ban’quet afterparty
* discovered the true identity of the mysterious and very, very funny AR.

Plus, bookish social networking is an excellent way of sourcing catsitters. Alex is Catsitter by Appointment to Andre and Karina Brink’s kitties. Sven is charged with looking after Meg and Lily when I am forced to leave them. (The first time he cat-sat for me, he managed to break a coffee plunger and one of my freezer drawers, which he reported anxiously and punctiliously upon my return. Ecstatically clutching my babies, I cried “I don’t care WHAT you broke, as long as it wasn’t the cats.” Whereupon he said, “I got the plaster off Meggie’s leg just in time, then…”)

Finally — and I don’t care how pathetic this might sound — because of my cats, others see me as a mother of sorts. Last Mother’s Day, I got congratulatory wishes from Tom Eaton, because “you ARE a mother — meow.” And the Brinks invited me to a Catmothers’ Day brunch. Those of you who have read my poems in Strange Fruit will have some idea of what this means to me. The other day, I attended the first birthday party of Keitu, dino-kitten offspring of Lauren Beukes and Matthew Brown. I joined a whole bunch of mothers, nannies, toddlers, babies and a few dads in a lovely park, and much fun was had by all. I was the only non-parent. As I said to Diane Awerbuck, mother of beautiful blue-eyed Joseph, “It’s like we all have pets. Only these are messier and noisier than mine. Plus I don’t have to worry about school fees.”

Happy birthday, my oblivious and adored ones. And thank you, for all of the above.