The Solitary Author—and Those Who Were Not

When I started fully writing my novels, I definitely needed someone who would check my grammar and my spelling mistakes. Someone who would say, this paragraph is not needed here, or, you need to add an explanation to this. In fact, an Editor.

I soon found out that an Editor was extremely expensive at that time, around the 1990s, the cost for one page of editing was incredibly high. I then opted for editing applications and I found one that seemed to help a lot. It would check repeated words, wrong context, spelling, grammar, etc.. However it was terribly laborious, and it always cost me more, in time and effort, than authoring my novels.

I insisted. I knew years before, authors would consistently send their manuscripts to editorial houses to see, to hope, they were accepted, considered for publication and then, a specific editor from the editorial house would take the manuscript into his or her hands, review it, get back to the author, discuss issues and consider changes. That did not seem to be happening anymore.

Slowly and in an exceedingly difficult way, I started doing the editing myself. Naturally never as good as an editor would have, but I tried. I remember once, after reviewing the manuscript maybe ten or more times, I published.

The story, at the first chapter, contained a description of a young woman with a pearl necklace. What showed in my published book was ‘pear necklace’ and it was only after a friend dared to read my book that he caught the error. I was ashamed, I was humiliated and terrified. What if someone else read my book?

When I wrote Sent Back - Across Time and Space, I reviewed it constantly. The same happened. Why, because when you write and write and review yourself, you tend to review the words and meanings, but you do not read character by character.

And then I got angry, then I got tired and even envious. I read about famous authors. Not that I would compare myself to them, just to know how they had managed.

I found Alexandre Dumas and Auguste Maquet. Maquet was not a secretary. He researched historical material and supplied scenarios and drafts for works associated with Dumas, including the Musketeers cycle and The Count of Monte Cristo. Dumas then transformed the material through dialogue, pace, characterization, and serial architecture. The partnership therefore belongs near co-authorship, even if the exact division varies by work.

I found Fyodor Dostoevsky and Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina. Trained in stenography, Anna Snitkina took Dostoevsky’s dictation for The Gambler under an extreme contractual deadline and transcribed the shorthand into manuscript. After their marriage she also handled publishing, distribution, finances, archives, and the preservation of his literary estate.

Then came Leo Tolstoy, whom I have admired forever, and Sophia Andreevna Tolstaya. Sophia Tolstaya deciphered and made fair copies of Tolstoy’s difficult manuscripts, including repeated manuscript versions of War and Peace, while also managing extensive family and publishing responsibilities. Popular accounts often say she copied the entire novel seven times; the safer formulation is that she copied multiple complete or substantially complete versions as Tolstoy repeatedly revised it.

I also found out about Thomas Wolfe and Maxwell Perkins. Perkins helped turn Wolfe’s enormous manuscript "O Lost" into "Look Homeward, Angel"" through extensive cutting and reorganization. The often-repeated figure is approximately sixty thousand words removed. Scholars still debate whether later accounts exaggerated Perkins’s creative control; Perkins himself described the work more as reorganization than authorship.

The novel carried Wolfe’s byline. Perkins’s intervention became famous in literary history, but readers encountering the original edition were not presented with a granular disclosure of his structural work.

Many more authors did have helpers, perhaps many more than have already been recorded.

In my particular situation, I was working not only on the manuscript, but I was also working on the printed book.

By that time, there were some self-publishing companies out there, of those, I first used Lulu and then, Create Space, because the private, independent editorial that was started by a friend of mine and I had first used… didn’t perform as needed.

So, there I was, trying to create everything needed for my book. Images for the book cover, managing the spine, the width and height of the book cover, all those issues that Editorial Houses usually take from the hands of authors and handle by themselves. Maybe more than ten times had I to go back and redo all, not only the manuscript, but the images, the sizes, other particulars. Then when I got proficient, Amazon bought those companies and I had to start all over again with new procedures, new templates.

Usually, the author created the manuscript, and the rest was handled by the editorial.

Who designed the cover? Most probably the publisher’s art department or a freelance designer commissioned by the art director. The editor and marketing department participated because the cover was considered a sales instrument. The author might be consulted, particularly if already successful, but normally did not possess final contractual control.

A designer could receive a synopsis, marketing description, comparable covers, audience information, and occasionally the manuscript. The designer then created possible directions. Editors, art directors, production personnel, salespeople, and marketing executives evaluated them.

I was doing all that myself, and the work seemed huge.

Then, during my research and some movies, I came in contact with something called the ‘ghost writers’. I was shocked, but well, it takes all kinds. I searched more and learned about the Stratemeyer Syndicate. Edward Stratemeyer created series concepts, characters, house styles, and often detailed outlines. Hired writers then wrote the actual manuscripts for a flat fee.

Stated author - Carolyn Keene, Book – Nanc Drew

Stated author - Franklin W. Dixon, Book – The Hardy Boys

Stated author - Victor Appleton, Book – Tom Swift

And several others, in fact neither Carolyn Keene nor Franklin W Dixon ever existed.

Another example I found was Francine Pascal and Sweet Valley High. Pascal created the world, characters, backstories, and dramatic machinery of Sweet Valley High. She wrote the earliest books and then used a team of writers to maintain the enormous series.

The solitary author, then, has always been partly a myth. Behind the author’s name on the cover there have been other eyes, other hands and sometimes other minds: a spouse deciphering and copying pages, a researcher preparing historical material, a stenographer taking dictation, an editor removing thousands of words, or an unnamed writer producing an entire manuscript from someone else’s outline.

When readers received the book, do they ever ask: was this author who authored this book? Is it truly his or hers? Do the readers ever take a minute to check on who the was editor, or who designed the book cover images? No! They go into the book and read. Or maybe put the book by the side to read later and never return to it.

When I read War and Peace, I never knew about Tolstoy’s wife and how she had helped him. I never imagined Dostoyevsky had a helper. The existence of help did not erase authorship, because authorship was understood to reside primarily in the originating vision, the creative decisions and the responsibility for the finished work.

Perhaps the real question has never been whether an author received help. Authors almost always have. The real questions are: Who conceived the work? Who shaped its meaning? Who made the final decisions? And who stands behind the words once the book enters the world?