Editing as a creative act

According to English author, essayist, and playwright Fay Weldon, every writer has two personalities: A, who produces first drafts, is ‘creative, impetuous, wilful, emotional, sloppy’, and B, who edits them, is ‘argumentative, self-righteous, cautious, rational, effective.’ But can editing itself be a creative act? This article will focus on two separate projects carried out by the author involving editing interview material. Creative practice as research undertaken for a PhD in Creative Writing involved interviewing mothers and shaping the material, using a range of creative processes to produce a form of hybrid life writing, combining edited verbatim material with creative responses (poetry, re-imagined scenes, lyric essay, and collage quotation). A subsequent life writing project, an auto/ethnography on menopause, further developed the author’s appreciation for the art of editing. Links will be made to oral historians’ work, including Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl, described as a ‘novel of voices’, for which she received the Nobel Prize for Literature, and John Banville’s comments on Tony Parker: ‘By means of arrangement and pattern, rhythm and tone … he makes out of these tape-recorded testimonies a kind of art’, exploring the extent to which editing interviews can be seen as a creative act.