The vanishing art of editing: Can AI save the future of literature?

Recently, as one of the jurors for JK Paper and TOI's AutHer Awards, I had the profound- and sometimes overwhelming- pleasure of reading dozens of fine new Indian novels. Ramona Sen’s 'The Lady and the Horse' unfolded with precision, tracing colonial Bengal through the eyes of a fiesty woman armed with little more than a sewing machine and a black stallion. In 'Never Never Land', Namita Gokhale captured the ineffable pull of home, layering nostalgia with wry observation, with the landscape of Kumaon as her secret central character. Tania James’s 'Loot' is miraculous for being sweeping as well as tightly wrought, a meditation on conquest and creation, rendered in prose as elegant as the mysterious automaton at the heart of its story.
While discussing the AutHer Award longlist with Jaya Bhattacharji Rose, Director of AutHer Awards, we lamented the role of the ‘vanishing editor’. Once critical to the publishing process, editors are now largely marketing people trained to ask authors for valuable blurbs while neglecting the all too critical ‘sentence on sentence’ work. Twenty years ago, when my first novel 'The Last Song of Dusk' came out, it was lucky to be loved but plagued with a repeating criticism: it was not edited adequately. As I read proofs of the twentieth year edition that came out last year, I flinched internally at sentences that were standout examples of purple prose. In my defence, I was 22 when I wrote the book’s first draft; if only an editor had sat me down, a fresh out of college writer, and taken me through the process of revision. Flash forward twenty years on, when I wrote 'Loss', a collection of essays on death and grief: not only did I work with an in-house editor, I hired two editors to work with me to cut the book to size, edit for excess, refine for mood and structure. I could not have made a better investment.
I place editing as the singular most key aspect after the writing of a book. The writers I had the privilege to read for the AutHer Award were dazzlingly talented, some more than others, but all united by how much stronger the books would have been if they had been more keenly, more thoughtfully, more artfully edited; they might have been leaner books, and better for a lack of literary fat, more engaging in their directness. Stephen King has wonderful advice for writers: Kill Your Darlings, which is to say, leave out all the fancy show off stuff authors love to get to the stuff that readers will relish. These tasks are not mutually exclusive because when a writer gets to their page with straightforwardness and detachment, the book is cleaner, and more authentic for it. Writing a book is like raising a child: you think it is perfect but others will know it for a multitude of personal annoyances. Love is blind – and blinding.
Maxwell Perkins, floor manager of American literature’s finer works, urged both Hemingway and Fitzgerald to a disciplined, economical style. Gordon Lish was credited for Raymond Carver’s ahead-of-its-curve minimalism and Toni Morrison tributes her editor, Robert Gottlieb, for enhancing 'Beloved', her operatic masterpiece of slavery and freedom. Without an editor, a writer is only half as good. With a quality editor, a writer can be doubly excellent.
But where are the editors in India? With hundreds of books published each year, who has the time, the money, the energy, or quite frankly, the talent to edit?
Here’s hope: I believe AI is not here to generate content alone. When it does, it produces like a machine, dull, mechanical, plastic. But AI tools could edit prose like a bonsai artist, pruning excess, sharpening high qualities, cutting sentences that obscure movement of plot and storyline. The New York Times already has adopted such AI tools for editing. Meru Gokhale, formerly a traditional book publisher, is at work on creating software to help writers edit their work. Powered by AI, such software could help writers address the critical lack of editorial interventions that conventional publishing houses simply cannot afford. Writers will never be replaced but their tasks can and should be aided – the time to start is now.
Shanghvi is author, most recently, of Loss