Censorship of a piece of writing in our ‘democratic’ communities is not as simple as someone in a position of authority deciding what can and can’t be read. It is far more complex. It may well begin with a nation or state setting laws about what is morally acceptable for publishing/reading and what is not, but after that there are many players who make choices and decisions:
 
1.     First, the writer will choose what they want to write about – the language, the characters, the moral content, the actions. One colleague told me she is happy to write dark content for her teenage readers but she will NEVER kill a cat in her stories.
2.     Sometimes, the writer’s beta readers – family, friends, trusted colleagues – will influence the content before the final manuscript is completed.
3.     If the manuscript arrives at a publishing house, trusted readers employed by the publisher will have their input as to what should or should not be published.
4.     The publisher’s editor (or editors) will choose what will be published and what might need to be edited/changed/removed from the original.
5.     Then the publishers booksellers sometimes have influence, especially of dealing with a bookshop owner who can only stock some but not all the books being offered by the publisher.
6.     The bookshop owner and staff then introduce their level of preference for which books will get shelf exposure and recommendations and which will be silently stowed on the shelf. This extends to the amount of shelf life a book receives before it is removed and replaced.
7.     Then the buyer makes choices based on personal interests, moralities, and what is available and recommended.
 
If the book is sold into schools, another raft of people are involved in the book’s ‘censorship:’
 
8.     The school is likely to have a book selection policy determining what is acceptable and what is not.
9.     The school librarian and possibly the key leader of the English department will choose what books will be purchased for specific class study
10.  The school librarian can choose to promote, display obviously, or ignore general books in the library
11.  Parents will weigh into book selection based on their values and beliefs
12.  Finally, students will make choices on non-class texts when they browse the library.
 
I began a PhD in 2002 based on censorship of teenage fiction in Australia and proved through research with writers, publishers and bookshop owners (right down to not being able to complete my PhD) that censorship in Australian publishing is ‘silent’ but powerful, and based on the steps and processes listed above.
 
Roald Dahl’s writing exists. He wrote the right material at the right time within the cultural and historical context of his time, in the same way as Shakespeare and thousands of other writers wrote tales that reflect the attitudes and issues of their times. Efforts to update, sanitise, change the original work may have good intentions – I don’t doubt that – to keep good stories alive across generations and cultural changes, but it is censorship, and it is an attempt to rewrite history to suit our own needs, and we have to be blatantly honest about doing that if we feel there is a genuine need for it.
 
Then the cynic in me is wary of the people who want to sanitise Dahl’s works for selfish reasons:
 

• It enables the books to keep earning money for the people invested in them
• It allows people who loved the books as children to share them with their children but without having to address the culturally inappropriate bits
• It satisfies current cultural priorities

 
To the point: if Dahl’s books are not to your taste, seriously, choose to read another writer. Thousands of new and fascinating stories for children are published every year, most within the current cultural context and written specifically to fit the contemporary ethical and cultural trends/tastes/changes we want to embrace. Maybe the truth is that Roald Dahl’s time has come and gone, much like Enid Blyton’s, Edith Nesbitt’s, J M Barrie’s, Erich Kastner’s popularity came and went within their times. Time and tastes might invalidate the sales popularity of a writer, but it should not invalidate the writer’s works, only highlight their cultural contexts and readers’ choices.
 
We have multiple levels of censorship in place and thousands of current and amazing writers seeking to be read: there is no need to sanitise the past to satisfy the present.

​As a teenager, Josie enjoyed dancing and her brothers would take her out to swing and then rock and roll dances. When her older sister, Eileen, began dating and then married a man from the Meningie area, she travelled back and forth to country dances held in the Ashville hall, and there she met John Webb. The two eventually married, settled in Meningie and had two sons.
 
My memories of Josie firstly revolve around Friday nights, and Saturdays and Sundays in the 1960s, when my parents would periodically visit John and Josie in Meningie to play cards and chat in the kitchen while I spent the evening or afternoons lost in the miracle of television in the lounge room (we didn’t have electricity or television on the farm until I was 12). These were the times of ‘The Flintstones’, ‘Wagon Train’, ‘Have Gun Will Travel’, ‘Maverick’, ‘Davy Crockett’, ‘World Championship Wrestling’ and ‘Roller Derby’ TV shows. Then there were Saturday nights spent spotlighting for rabbits on the farm. And lastly, in my early teens, there were football days, whenever the club I played for, Border Downs, played Meningie.
 
Josie excelled in playing local golf, and in later years she was a good lawn bowler. There were many good years for her in Meningie after a tough childhood, but life always deals mixed cards, and she struggled when her younger son died in a tragic boating accident in Lake Albert/Coorong, and again when her husband John died. At 82, battling health complications, Josie passed. This Friday, family and friends will say farewell in a ceremony at the Meningie Bowling Club.
 
So, novel editing this week is tinged with sadness, emphasising how important it is to savour relationships, stay in touch with family, and record life. The last time I sat with Josie, she shared her story during the time the novel covers. Much of it happened outside the scope of my mother’s life, but it’s important to know what was happening while Eileen was away from her siblings in Victoria and Tasmania, and then recuperating from TB, because it shapes her world and relationships ever so subtly.

What a massive difference the use of time becomes when writing is a full time option. In the space of two weeks I completed edits of three novels, a task that would normally take at least a month for each one when I was working in school!
 
Apart from all the common corrections re typos, grammar, spelling and so on, my editing process last week addressed, for example, issues like:

1. Disappearing characters

Four major background characters had ‘disappeared’ ie their fates were unresolved in Book Four. I have addressed two and the other two will be dealt with today. Once the plot of Book Four stopped dealing with these characters they literally slipped off the radar of the tale. They need to reappear appropriately, even if they remain ‘off stage’ in events.

1. Time

While I was conscious of the story arc spanning several years, I had not meticulously mapped the exact time in the drafts. I was able to work through and find that the whole story across four books covers a period of seven years in our characters’ lives. The three human protagonists ‘come of age’ in their respective books – the dragon ‘matures’ and certainly grows in physical size.

1. Currency

Originally, I named the currency coins ‘keys’ (ie money opens doors) but the clash with that word for actual keys across the story was just annoying, so the realm coins are ‘bits’.

1. Repetitive/overused phrases and words

So many actions are repeated in telling a story that some words and phrases need to be altered with synonyms or eliminated as unnecessary. For example, in my case, I have (and will again today) work through the stories to deal with excessively repeated use of ‘turned to’, ‘looked at’, ‘said’, ‘met X’s gaze’, ‘approached’ and a host of others.

1. Said

I use substantial dialogue in storytelling because I believe it shows rather than tells what is happening with characters, but while there are many synonyms to describe speaking it becomes highly repetitive to use said (and sometimes forced when I replace a simple ‘said’ with ‘replied casually’. I don’t think I can ever complete or get this task balanced enough.

1. Scenery description

I like opening chapters and sections in chapters with a snippet of the place to set the scene. Unfortunately, across four books at 30 chapters per book and possibly anywhere up to 300 sections overall, scene snippets also become repetitive eg ‘gulls circling fishing boats’, ‘sun sinking’, ‘birds heading to roost’, and so on. The challenge is to find enough variation while retaining reader reference to the setting/place.

1. Connection to past series

The Andrakis trilogy way back in 1992/3 established a fantasy world, magic sources and dragon culture which I subsequently used and embellished in the 2002/3 Ashuak Chronicles and 2006/8 Dreaming in Amber series. These are now weaved into The Last Wizard sagas. Chronologically, The Last Wizard comes after the other three series, but in another part of the greater world, much further east. There is a partially completed loosely titled Dragon Queen series I started in 2011 that sits between Dreaming in Amber and The Last Wizard that is also somewhere on the drawing board for completion. All five series are connected now.

1. Endings

The Last Wizard sagas are coming of age tales, so each book is designed to end with the main character having some understanding of who they are becoming and their possible purpose. The fourth book also summarises the outcomes for all four characters. The editing challenge is to make that ending satisfactory and complete for the readers who have come on the long journey. While the ending completes the overall tale/adventure, I do deliberately leave open the possibility for a whole new adventure to begin for our ‘matured’ characters. I can’t help it.
 
Those are samples of what I put into a ‘third’ edit process when writing. This week, when the last issues mentioned above are resolved, I will do a full read of the saga to check for any glaring issues I somehow missed. Then it’s time for beta readers.

One week into full time writing and the writing job is already very different. There is much to do in the coming weeks:

• Establish a weekly routine
• Reconnect writing relationships
• Edit five draft projects in readiness for making publisher approaches
• Plan new projects
• Reconstruct my web site
• Research potential writing markets
• Research, learn and apply marketing and promotion skills

 
This first week I busied myself with two key tasks:

• Editing two novels – Chasse’s Song and Jaysin’s Song in The Last Wizard series
• Attending a six-day Kindle online publishing program

 
The online program, run by Ty Cohen and the Writers Life team, was a basic and free overview of how to approach writing for Amazon Kindle. It was highly informative, and I have several take-aways from it that I will pursue later in the year as I amass material. While it focused on several essential matters, including:

• Self-belief
• Self-discipline
• Know the markets
• Make connections
• Focus on one project first
• Learn to market

 
I also learned surprising aspects of the Amazon writing industry:
​

• Hundreds of ghost writers are available on sites like Upworks.com for very cheap rates to write text for you: the ‘session musicians’ of the publishing industry
• AI (artificial intelligence) programs are being embraced and widely employed to write
• so-called ‘writers’ are cobbling together books using the ghost writers and AI (artificial intelligence) and making significant sales

 
The online program has given me a great deal of food for thought as I move forward.