What does the house expect from you? What will the author tolerate? And what would be useful and helpful? It’s a matter of triangulation. It’s a matter of developing your own judgment and then acting on it.
CLERKING basically involves “Just apply the style sheet, and check for typos, that’s all.” And there are houses and/or specific MEs that expect you to do no more and that will count it against you if you go beyond. Similarly, there are CEs out there who do no more than that and who would tell you, if pressed, that a CE can’t improve any piece of writing and shouldn’t try. That mindset doesn’t do anyone any favours. A well-conducted CE will always help. A competent CE will constantly be critiquing the author’s writing style, listening for her writing voice, and then asking, “On her best day, how would she have said this?” Clerking gives no room for the CE to ask that question, and the mscript will suffer from that elision, because no author is going to be at her best all the time.
Authors’ expectations vary, and a CE who is paranoid about overstepping will keep changes to a minimum, the minimum being clerking. The resulting book will never be as good as it could have been. As a matter of pride, I always refused to work that way. Houses would sometimes tell me, “Go light on this one,” and I’d say “Sure, will do,” and then go ahead and give the mscript what I thought would help it. Heavensake, everything I do is advice, for the author to accept or not. My clients soon stopped asking me to go light, and I rarely did. It turned out that authors often resented other CEs’ heavy edits, but they liked mine.
Comes to REWRITING, every author has their own voice, by which I mean a certain way of choosing words and phrasing things, as well as an approach to structuring sentences that is more or less innate. When you interfere too much with that, you’re rewriting, which is overstepping. A few times a publisher has sent me a mscript specifically because they thought it needed a rewrite, and I’ve sent it back with a light or at most moderate edit. When asked why, I’ve said, “Because that’s what she sounds like.” In other words, she’s madly elaborate with her sentence structures and leans far too heavily toward arcane vocabulary, among other possibilities. But she’s like that all the time. I tend to ask a standard question: “On her best day, how would this author has said this?” And when she could have said it better by her own lights, then I’ll step in.
There’s no accounting, I must add, for what authors think about your work. Some of them will view whatever you did, however, light, as a rewrite. “You changed my voice!” (Sigh: “What was your voice to start with?”) And that perennial favourite: “How dare you change my meaning!!! (Sigh: What was your meaning to start with?”)
An author who is also a good writer will know when a change you’ve made is an improvement. An author who is a weak writer will tend not to have a clue. Most authors, whether strong or weak, will give the CE a lot of benefit of the doubt, not as an exercise of judgment (very few people, except competent MEs, are actually capable of judging a CE), but rather because they suffer from their own variety of paranoia (a different version than the CE’s …)
GREAT WRITING, UNNECESSARY BOOK
There is no strong correlation between superb writing and an important book. Dickens, Dostoevsky, Hugo, they all get a justified pass to the Pantheon of the Immortals, and rightly so, but it isn’t because they’re good writers. (Dickens in particular sets my teeth on edge for his overelaborate prose; Dostoevsky should have written half as much and taken twice the time; Hugo could be cripplingly self-indulgent). Then there are other writers, minor ones, whose books have no real reason to exist, but my God, do they have the craft nailed down. George MacDonald Fraser is one that comes to mind. I’m thinking less about his Flashman books (which he could have phoned in, after the first two or three) and more about the rest of his writing and his seemingly effortless grasp of the sound of English, of the pulse that runs through good writing and lifts it along. Black Ajax, Mr. American, Quartered Safe Out Here. Read them.