Bothersome Words

Are you ready for an editor?

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The other day someone asked what I was working on and then expressed surprise when I said it was the same manuscript they had asked about previously. They felt I had been working on it for a “long time” – in fact this particular tome was on a very tight deadline and needed to be completed far more quickly than usual. This, however, is not an unusual reaction from someone outside the profession – as far as they can tell, we editors just read for a living and how long, really, does it take to read a couple of pages?

When you come to an editor for a professional edit, they are not just reading your words. They are considering each word, each punctuation mark, and the context and flow of each; separately, in combination, and in the manuscript as a whole. They will go through your manuscript more than once.

If you are a new author, many editors will also endeavour to provide you the tools with which to learn so the process becomes easier and less complex for you as time goes on. Most first drafts, particularly of first-ever novels, require a lot of work and a lot of time, but new writers, seeking to get published, don’t always know what they’re getting into when they finished their first manuscript and start looking for help to “clean it up, ready for a publisher”.

Most people who decide they want to become authors pick up on one piece of advice pretty quickly. They know that if they want to achieve their dream of becoming published, they need to write.

However, further down the track when that first novel draft is completed, things are not always so clear. Not everyone is surrounded by fellow writers, or knows what next step they need to take. Many people know only that once they have written their manuscript they need to get it to a publisher and, having looked about a little (online, or perhaps browsing the “how to get published” section of a bookshop or library), they realise they probably need to have that manuscript edited first.

This blog post is about how there is much more to it than that.

Because so often freelance editors get emails from people asking for quotes to edit the first draft of the first manuscript they’ve ever written – sometimes the first thing they’ve written since high school.

This blog post is about why you might want to put a little more work into that manuscript first, about why you might want to spend a little more time working on your own writing and editing skills before you hire someone else.

There are plenty of authors who can tell you why you’d do this from a writing perspective. There are plenty of publishing sitesthat will tell you why to do this, too.

This post talks about it from the editing perspective.

There are a number of different ways to work with a manuscript, depending on what stage the work is up to. An editor may do a structural edit, (which will go over the “big picture” stuff, checking plot, characters, consistency and – well – overall structure, as well as identifying any major repeated errors in grammar, spelling, punctuation etc.)  a copy edit (this goes through the manuscript in detail, checking facts, consistency of plot and characters, as well as language, spelling, grammar, punctuation etc.), or just a straight proofread (this is less detailed and and usually ensures that all the spelling, grammar, punctuation and formatting is in order ready for print, but may also catch out any jarring facts or wording).
Depending on the author’s skill level and the state of the manuscript, the editor may decide to do a combination of these.
Alternatively, an editor can complete a manuscript assessment. Depending on the author’s wishes, this can be done at the start of the editing process – so the writer gets an idea of how much work is required on the novel, or at the end, so they can see if it’s actually ready for publication or submission to publishers.

An editor, as explained in previous posts, is there to help the author get the story in their head out on the page. Obviously the more experience an author has, the cleaner the manuscript is that the editor is working with, the easier this task is.

If an author shows up with a manuscript they have never even looked over, that is a much bigger task. It is not realistic to spend the time (or money) on all the things that likely require attention.

No matter how good the basic story is, if it is written entirely in a passive voice, or the dialogue is clunky, or there are constant shifts in tense or points of view; this draws attention away from plot errors, or grammar problems, or spelling mistakes. It’s highly unlikely that a writer would want to pay for the hundreds of hours it would take a professional editor to amend, correct and explain the problems in such a manuscript. So the editor has to make a choice as to what to focus on and that means other elements miss out.

It is not always clear what the author may actually want – do they just want what’s on the page cleaned up, or do they want the story to be the best it can be? Often it can seem that what the writer really wants is a mentor and this is really a separate task to editing.

 

If you’re a new writer serious about developing your skills and creating the best story you can, there are other stages you should consider before you think about engaging a freelance editor:

  • After completing that very first draft: let it sit for a while. Let your brain refresh before you go back over it yourself and check the story for issues as well as looking out for grammar and punctuation.
  • Do you have friends or family who you can trust to read over your work critically? Pass it to them and ask for feedback.
  • If mentoring is what you’re after, consider joining a writers’ group – there’s bound to be one in your city or even online. These don’t work for everyone and you have to find the right mix of people, but such groups can be invaluable. Writers’ centres often also run workshops and mentorships.

All these things can help you workshop your manuscript in ways that could be quite expensive with a professional editor. Plus, you will learn more if you work through these stages yourself, rather than paying someone else to clean up the early draft/s and supply you with a report or some notes.

And if this list looks daunting, if all this looks like too much effort, too time-consuming? You may need to reconsider why you wish to become an author. Because while it’s perfectly true that occasionally a first-draft manuscript arrives that is very clean – an amazing story, wonderfully told, that needs little help in the way of plot tightening or grammar correction, this is exceedingly rare.
Even published authors with ongoing publishing contracts and piles of bestsellers behind them work through a lot of these methods* – many of them have their own personal beta readers, take time out between drafts of their next bestseller, and they certainly go through several rounds of editing with their publisher. Why should it be any different when you’re starting out?

 

 

* Where do you think we learned about them?

 

Diana Wynne Jones

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It’s a sad and reflective time in the BW hovel today, with news that the great Diana Wynne Jones has passed away.

It’s no exaggeration to say that this author changed my life, though I never met her. Certainly she changed my reading habits, for though, as a child, I had already discovered fantasy through such books as Alice in Wonderland and the Chronicles of Narnia, it was Diana Wynne Jones who really brought my love of the genre to life. My devotion to her stories was enough for me to decide at quite a young age that one day I would not only work with books, but I would work with books just like these.

Diana Wynne Jones Books

My first DWJ was Charmed Life, given to me by a book-loving relative when I was somewhere around seven or eight years old. I fell head over heels from the first page and from then on my whole family ensured I was regularly supplied with a DWJ fix. This was not always easy, particularly during the dark days when so many of her works seemed to be out of print – sometimes my habit was fuelled with ancient, second-hand copies, the covers sticky and grimy with age. But I didn’t care. Only the stories inside mattered, and those were intact.

Later there were reprints as fantasy fell back into publishing-favour, and I quickly gathered up books I hadn’t even realised were missing from my collection. That same relative who’d gifted me with my first DWJ continued sending adult-me the latest releases when she came across them.

Meanwhile I’d found a more immediate source – a friend who worked at the local arm of DWJ’s publisher occasionally provided me with advance copies.

As an adult, I reread the books and marvel at the layers – the hidden themes and meaning (often so much darker and more serious than I ever realised as a child), the different historical and mythological elements that are woven into the various tales. But reading as a child it was the simple things I adored.

Despite having no interest in science, I wanted a chemistry set like the ones in The Ogre Downstairs. And I developed a peculiar fascination with matchbooks after reading Charmed Life and Eight Days of Luke. To this day, I get a little thrill every time I find one – so much more magical and olde worlde than a matchbox.

Of course, with Diana Wynne Jones books it is the very ordinariness mixed in with the magic and quirkiness that make them so special. There is something delightful in the notion that a powerful enchanter might use plain old stainless steel in place of the “proper” silver cutlery that cripples him. Jones’s heroes are nearly all ordinary people, complete with their own flaws and foibles, and while sometimes they perform magnificent feats, nine times out of ten, it’s their ordinary strength and wit and courage and mostly common sense that sees them through outlandish and twisted circumstances; staring down the most wicked, selfish, pompous and powerful villains. And usually, the hardest thing they have to overcome is not the wild and magical danger, but the very ordinary and human traits of doubt and fear of being humiliated.

Her books are things to be treasured but, I learned, shared sparingly and cautiously. Having once given a good friend a copy of Fire and Hemlock (my own best-beloved copy deemed far too precious to leave the house) I was horrified when she casually told me she’d thought it was ‘quite good’ but ‘a bit weird’. I loved my friend a tiny bit less after that faint praise and vowed never to chance Charmed Life on anyone unless I could be certain of appropriate levels of adoration.

In the online world I have since met hundreds of the millions of DWJ devotees out there. Now I find it commonplace to see blog discussions on the merits of Howl or stranded commuters tweeting requests to Hathaway for a bus.

What a wonderful legacy she has left us with. And how sad for everyone that she has left so soon.

Just a fraction too much fiction

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People often describe authors as artists or craftsmen, but have you ever thought of them as master manipulators? I recently had a conversation during which a friend informed me that they never read fiction because they “didn’t like to be manipulated”.

At first my reaction was one of incredulity. How can anyone not enjoy stories? And how could such a cold word as “manipulation” be used to describe the process of journeying through someone else’s imagination?

But really, I suppose, that’s exactly what it is.

I have read tales depicting snowstorms so realistic that I have found myself huddled under a blanket in mid-summer and downed gallons of water to quench unreal thirst in sympathy for fictional characters stranded in equally fictional desert lands.

The other night I woke up feeling sick and calmed myself back to sleep when I “remembered” the cause: I had drunk several litres of blood after dinner. It was only the next morning, when I was fully awake, that I realised how odd this was. I had become so absorbed in the story I was reading in the evening that later, in my half-awake state, I’d actually thought I’d lived it.

Clearly, as a reader, I am very suggestible. I should keep that in mind when planning what to read before falling asleep – fewer vampire novels; more stories about sunshine and rainbows. When I get into a book, I really get into it. I absolutely experience the life and emotions of the characters.

And isn’t that what every writer strives for? To get the reader to care? To paint pictures and scenes with words so readers really believe they’re standing in that street? Sitting on that couch?

Of course, as both an editor and a reader, I regard all these experiences as signs of powerful writing – indications that the authors have the ability to captivate their audiences with nothing but words.

My compatriot, I suspect, would suggest that I must suffer from some form of readers’ Stockholm syndrome to view such manipulation in so positive a fashion.

I can’t really take issue with this stance that fiction is a manipulative experience to be avoided.* If someone prefers not to have their emotions falsely tugged or their adrenaline tested by make-believe events perhaps, on the face of it, that’s reasonable. Maybe not everyone is okay with waking up believing they might actually have drunk three litres of blood – who am I to judge?

But it does seem a shame to avoid one’s own imagination in this way.

There’s a kind of magic that takes place when a writer creates something – a person, a scene, a world, an event – with words; but the reader has to submit, yes, yield to the manipulation, in order for the spark to catch.

In some ways, it is a matter of trust. The imaginations of both the writer and the reader must come into play. The reader must trust the author to allow his or her words “in”; the author must trust his or her readers enough to set the words free in the first place.**

I’m still not sure I can see this as harshly as the word “manipulation” implies. There’s too much joy and exhilaration to be found exploring my own imagination and that of others.

I think good writing should touch your readers’ hearts, they should believe in your characters and their experiences. I think a true test of a story is whether your reader emerges at the end believing, even if it’s only for a moment, that it was all real; and I am far too biased to be able to see this as a bad thing.

What do you think? Have you ever felt manipulated by a writer (or a story)? Did this spoil your experience? Are you anti-fiction? How do you feel about trust between author and reader?


* I didn’t ask my friend how he felt about arguably similarly manipulative artistic enjoyments such as art, music or film. And of course, there are another ten blog posts in the idea that even (or especially) non-fiction writing can manipulate too. News, biography, autobiography, history, politics… there’s plenty of fodder there!

** Because let’s not forget, the author is dead. Death is a pretty big price to pay for a little mental manipulation… And now the internet is around and online discussion prevails, there are a lot more corpses.

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