Category Archives: Editing/writing life

About doing this stuff for a living.

Editing/writing life

Ordering your clauses

2 Comments

It’s writing guidance time again, and I want to talk about order–word and clause order. We often write like we think, tacking on clauses in whatever order, because we know what we mean. The reader may not, or s/he may be able to decode the meaning but doesn’t want to have to.

I’m going to show you some sentences, and why the order of clauses matters. I guess technically they may not be defined as clauses, but it’s easier to say that than ‘pieces of speech one may switch around,’ and I can live without looking for the definition of that.

“Ronda Rousey made her first major public appearance since she was knocked out by Holly Holm on Saturday Night Live.” [Yahoo Sports, reporting on a January 23 airing.] The writing is unclear, even misleading, because it implies that Holm knocked Rousey out on the TV show. Better: “On Saturday Night Live, Ronda Rousey made her first major public appearance since Holly Holm knocked her out.” Clarifies that the knockout was prior to the show, doing away with passive voice into the bargain.

A better sentence yet would add the date of the knockout to the end, but the original’s biggest problem is that it forces the reader to stop and sort the words back into the correct order. The writer who thinks readers enjoy having to do that is a clod, and should change his or her thinking. It’s not that the reader can’t figure out your meaning with effort; it’s that this is a poor reason to force him or her to do so.

“2016 commit Van Soderberg finished his last high school class on Friday and will enroll at UW for the Spring quarter in March.” [UW Dawg Pound, January 31, 2016] Awkward, because it implies that there could be multiple Spring quarters, some of which do not occur in March, and we know that’s not possible. Better: “2016 commit Van Soderberg finished his last high school class on Friday and will enroll at UW in March for the Spring quarter.”

Better still, leave off “the Spring quarter.” What other quarter or semester would begin in March?

“As you can see, each service thinks Petersen’s classes at Washington have improved each year, and while the 2016 class is a smaller one due to a small graduating class, it’s the best on a per recruit basis of his three classes.” [UW Dawg Pound, February 3, 2016] The word order jolts the flow near the end. This is a sentence that sounds all right when spoken, but does not read as well in print. To write like one talks is not an asset, because people do not read like they listen. Better: “…it’s the best of his three classes on a per-recruit basis.”

Better still: “…recruit for recruit, it’s the best of Petersen’s three classes.”

Get it? If you think about the clauses relate to one another, it will not be difficult to arrive at the clearest possible sequence.

Editing/writing life

Every new author does this. Why?

6 Comments

When I take on a new client–whether this writer has previously published, or is green–I can count upon one thing.

No, it’s not an emotional quirk, like fear, touchiness, defensiveness, resistance to change.

It’s not a need to educate about The Comma Formerly Known As Oxford, adverbs, show over tell, or other common writing issues.

It is not a need to impress the urgency of marketing.

It is so much more basic. It involves two keystrokes that are by custom invisible: the space and the hard return, and their misuse and abuse.

I get mss full of stuff that has been aligned on pages by just hitting Enter however many times. In some of those mss, the writer has also gaily aggregated five spaces at the start of each para, or more when the writer wanted to center something on a line. This is all stuff I end up fixing. Yes, I charge more for it, and no, I am not eager to find it nor to make the money fixing it, because it’s so avoidable. I would rather help my client tell his or her story, not clean up the client’s inability to grasp the word processor’s basics.

And no, this is not becoming a computer nerd. This is learning how to use the modern equivalent of your typewriter: the word processor, the writer’s primary tool of expressions. The writer who thinks s/he is too good, too artistique, too airy to learn to use the tool is like the painter who refuses to use the right lighting, or an auto mechanic with a wrench aversion, or a banker who won’t buy a suit. Doing it wrong doesn’t add to your charm and mystique.

Let us define. The single space is not an emptiness. It is a character. A character is one of the discrete letters, numbers, or symbols that make up the full set of little pictures one may cause to appear in one’s word processing software, blog platform, whatever. The space has a defined width in each typeface. (A font is not a typeface; a font is a combination of typeface and size, measured in points, of which 72 equal one inch high. Arial is a typeface. Arial 12 is a font.) Thus, when one hits the space bar, it is not the clever placement of a void. It is the placement of a symbol normally invisible to the reader. It can be underlined, for example, or struckthrough, and one will see it.

The hard return, or Enter, or paragraph break, is what you get when you hit the wide key at right of the keyboard that now goes by the name “Enter,” usually with an arrow symbol going down and to the left. Elders like myself, who took typing in high school, remember its origins: on the manual typewriter, it was a manual handle one had to pull after typing each line, called the “carriage return” because it returned the roller carriage to the left margin and rolled the roller one line downward. Then we got electric typewriters, and the carriage return became a key to the right of the home row. Then we got computers, and Return gave way to Enter.

Somewhere early in the computing age, Return/Enter became the key of choice for “make a selected thing happen.” Happily, word processing brought word wrap with it, which gave us the “soft return.” When you type to the end of a line, without hitting Enter, and the text begins a new line, the software has automatically inserted a soft return. And if you change your margins later, the soft returns will shift. To know how beautiful this is, one perhaps must have had to type all his college papers on an electric typewriter (three drafts per paper).

When you hit Enter in a word processor, you achieve precisely what we used to call a carriage return. When you hit it on a line that contains nothing, you begin a new line, leaving a line that has no characters other than a paragraph break. Yes, a paragraph break is a character, as surely as the e with an accent aigu (é) or octothorpe (#) or lower case p. When you hit the space bar, you type the character known as a space.

Also worth knowing: the software doesn’t see a page of text as a rectangle. That is just how the software presents it to the user. To the word processing software, everything you write is a straight line leading out toward infinity. We who used to use Word Perfect’s Reveal Codes function came to a very good understanding of this, as do HTML developers. To explain, let me write a sample para containing features, bearing in mind that this platform will not let me insert some mistakes (such as extra spaces or loose tab stops):

One may not normally underline text for emphasis, and bold is also bad form. Italics are correct, but are seductively easy to overuse. If I find

more than roughly one use of italics per chapter, it’s too many.

Here is how software is seeing that para, described in colloquial plain English rather than computerese, with hidden stuff in blue:

[Word wrap is turned on, so insert soft returns at the ends of lines] One may not normally [turn on underlining]underline[now stop underlining] text for emphasis, and [begin boldface]bold[shut off boldface] is also bad form. [turn on italics]Italics[shut off italics] are correct, but are seductively easy to overuse. If I find[para break in stupid place for demonstration purposes] more than roughly one use of italics per chapter, it’s too many.[para break in sane place]

Does that make more sense now? This is why, when I italicize something, I shut off the italics before I insert the next space. Have you ever meant to type after something that was in italics, and the stupid word processor thought you still wanted to be in italics? That’s because the writer, like nearly every writer, committed the error of hitting the space bar before turning the italics off. This way, if I put my cursor before the space, I’m still in italics. If I put it after the space, I’m out of italics, and won’t have to go back and repair it.

Just as there are soft returns, there are soft page breaks. If you want to force a page break, the software permits this. A forced page break is also called a hard page break.

Now, when we want to align text on a page, word processors give us tools for that. If we want to center our title on a title page, we don’t have to hit Enter a bunch of times until our centering meets the eyeball test. We just change the vertical alignment for that page from ‘Top’ to ‘Center,’ and it will align automatically. And since we did it that way, we do not need another dozen or so carriage returns in order to reach p.1. After our title, we can insert a hard page break (in Word it’s done with Ctrl-Enter). That is what we should do any time we want the software to begin a new page, most commonly at the end of a chapter. (As opposed to the lamentable yet common practice of just hammering the Enter key, inserting para breaks until one reaches the top of a new page.) Aligning it horizontally is even easier: there are buttons at the top for it. The spaces are cluttery garbage.

And when we want to move text a distance from the left margin–most notably, to begin a paragraph–that is what a tab stop is for. In the typing days, we had a little guide we had to drag to the right spot, then a key to set a tab stop. When we began a new para, having carriage returned our way back to the left margin, we would hit Tab to jump forward (indent) five spaces. This is also called indentation, but Word has confused the issue–and not for a bad reason. One may want to indent just the first line of each para, or one may want to indent an entire para (quoted material, for example), and the software needs to satisfy both feature needs.

So. If you’re a writer, and anything I am teaching you here is new to you, your word processor use is at the amateur level and needs to grow. And that’s okay. That’s why I wrote this, so I wouldn’t have to teach grade school stuff. Now that you understand how this all came to be, and why it works the way it does, please learn:

Space bar: between words. The standard is now one space after all punctuation, not two, no matter what Mrs. Nitpickering taught you in high school typing class. However: Tab (or indent or horizontal alignment): position text relative to left margin, right margin, both, or center.

Enter: to force the end of a paragraph. However: soft return will happen automatically when you are using word wrap (the normal default) and needs no attention.

Hard page break (Ctrl-Enter): to force the end of a page. You can display the para symbol (¶) to see these. However: soft page break will happen automatically when you hit the end of a page.

Know what is the first thing I do when I begin to edit a ms? I look at how the author aligned the title on the title page. If the author merrily spacebarred the title to a center position, I realize that my client doesn’t understand even the basics of how the software works, and I prepare to fix that. If the author blissfully aligned it vertically by just banging Enter a bunch of times, same conclusion. I will have to fix not only the writer’s English, but the basic misunderstanding of the tools, like a carpenter noting that someone did a lot of cross-cutting using the rip fence.

Then I do a global search for instances of two consecutive spaces, replacing each instance with one space. The older the client, the more instances there will be. Then I repeat the S&R, and again, until it finds no instances of two consecutive spaces, since there is nearly never a need for that. All those spaces the author merrily used to align his or her title (completely unnecessary at this point to begin with, but they all do it)? All gone. All those five-space fake indents? Reduced to single spaces.

There being no search criteria I can use to eliminate a single leading space at the start of each para, I’ll have to fix those manually. Every single one. Every para in the whole book, cursor to the start, hit Delete.

As I go, I will eliminate all instances of more than two consecutive hard returns. A good way to spot them is to push the button that displays para breaks. I’m okay with one hard return to end the para, then one to space between paras (though ideally I would do a little growing of my own, and use the software feature that will automatically insert extra space between paras, which I confess that I do not, but at least I’m a little ashamed of it). Any more than two is nearly never desirable.

I will also have to spend a lot of time unjunking the way the client did things like italics. If you want to add any kind of formatting (bold, italic, underline, strikethrough) that overlays the given typeface, do not include the leading and trailing spaces in the italicized area.

Here I am doing it right.

Here I am doing it_wrong.*

If means that if I want to insert a word after “it,” that word will be italicized as well. I will have to switch the feature off, and nullify underlining on the space preceding my new word. If I had done it correctly, as in the first example, I could simply begin my new word after the space following “it,” and my text would not be in italics. But what if I want to be in italics? I can just begin inserting text before the space, starting of course with a new space. Solved. That is why formatting continence matters, and one should not include leading or trailing spaces in formatting. Yet writers don’t know (or don’t care).

*Actually, the blog platform made it worse. It did not display the underlining of the trailing space, as Word does. It didn’t even show me the problem so that I might correct it. I had to cheat by typing an _ (underbar) in place of the space. How it looks here is designed to mock up what Word will do naturally.

And because writers blithely include the following space in their formatting, they make–and are charged full price for–a lot of extra work.

In the ideal reality, pride would demand a basic grasp of the software’s concepts. If that is not enough of a motivator, then perhaps money will do the trick. When clients garbage up a ms in these ways, I must and do charge them more, and not with any joy. If clients want to save a little money, there’s the path.

And if you have been making these mistakes, either with me or with another editor, it is okay. It really is okay. Push comes to shove, I can fix these forever. I would rather have a great ms to edit, yet junked up with loose spaces and flagrant hard returns, than a crummy ms done with fine technical acumen. I am not mad at you (can’t speak for other editors). But if you want to make me happy at you, you can start doing it right, so that I can start charging you a little less–and so that we can focus on big kid stuff like how best to develop your characters and present your ideas, and so that I can stop focusing on trivia that must be addressed yet represents mainly avoidable busywork.

Editing/writing life

Demystifying Editing and Proofreading

4 Comments

I wrote this for Ajoobacats, an influential and popular book reviewer. It was very kind of her to invite me to weigh in. Special thanks to Diane Anderson, who made the piece better in every way through editing. One of the best ways to learn that one needs an editor is to be an editor, write a piece, find oneself stuck, have another editor look at it and see the problems with ridiculous ease, and sigh with relief at the things she caught that I would not have.

ajoobacats's avatarAjoobacats Blog

Many times, whilst I am reading a book for review, I find the pace varies, the plot stalls, there’s a lack of consistency in the narrative or it is full of little errors and I am left thinking that the book could have been much better if it had been proofread or edited.

However, editing for me is a subject I know little about so I was delighted when freelance writer, editor and proofreader Jonathan at The ‘Lancer generously offered to guest post and explain to me and my readers the technicalities of editing and proofreading in a clear concise and easily understandable manor.

I am honoured and delighted to learn from an experienced and candid literary professional and I hope you will find his thoughts informative too.

An Editor’s Thoughts on Hiring an Editor, by J.K. Kelley

Ajoobacats was so kind as to invite my thoughts on the value…

View original post 1,374 more words

Book reviews, Editing/writing life

Guest post: So You Need a Book Review…

24 Comments

I have in the past offered advice to authors seeking book reviews. Until now, the advice came entirely from my own rather haphazard, quirky reviewing experiences. Clients ask me all the time for marketing advice, and since I am a marketing cretin, mine is not much good.

Today, I get some help from someone who likes reading at least as much as I do. Today we have the perspective of an acclaimed reviewer with an impressive body of work: ajoobacats, who seems to read and review about as many books in a year as there are business days. She has a significant audience, and authors seeking to promote their books are very fortunate to land on her reading schedule. In this guest post, she shares what you need to know and do–and not do–if you hope to shift into that promotional passing lane. Without further ado, and with my thanks for her willingness to share what she has learned:

So You Need a Book Review…

ajoobacatsI am a prolific reader and reviewer. In 2015 I read 235 books and reviewed the majority of them. I am ranked within the top 1000 Amazon UK reviewers. I have been receiving book review requests since I registered myself on various websites like Tweet Your Books, The Indieview, Netgalley etc in 2012. I receive a heavy stream of review requests from authors and publicists, the majority of which I have to pass on as there aren’t enough hours in the day. However, if you want your book to be in the small percentage of books I and other keen reviewers read and review, here are some tips on how to approach a reviewer.

Remember reviewers are voluntarily donating time to review your book to help you market them, simply for the reward of reading. Most of the reviewers you approach are enthusiastic bibliophiles, who have towering to-be-read piles of books and are inundated with book choices both free and paid from numerous sites on the internet. Those that like the sound of your book description really do want to like your book.

Firstly, and this might seem very obvious, but is frequently overlooked, see if the reviewer reads the genre your book belongs to. I get a huge number of review requests to read Non-Fiction books by writers who have obviously not read any of my blog including the guidelines page which outlines what type of books I read. Requests for such reviews often get deleted without even opening them. Why? Well, I don’t enjoy every book out there and in order to maximise my chances to spending the finite time I have on this earth to read on books I have a greater likelihood to enjoy I must limit my choices by genre.

Try to approach a reviewer like you would want to be approached by a stranger asking for your time. You’re more likely to get someone to read your book if you are personable. Rubbing people up the wrong way does not entice them to give you time or anything else. When you contact the reviewer do so according to guidelines given on their blog or profile. Just like you reviewers are busy and need to organise themselves in order to devote time needed to read and review. If a reviewer has given a certain email contact for book requests, please do use that email to contact them. Personally, when I get review requests by other means I’m less likely to accept and read that book. I compile my reading list according to the date I receive a review copy by email.

Make sure you understand the reviewers policy completely. Not all reviewers will leave a review if the book doesn’t appeal to them. I personally do not write reviews for books I would award two stars or less and do not routinely publish three star reviews on my blog. Reviewers who are accepting review requests are usually bombarded by review requests and for most their extensive reading lists are booked weeks in advance, but a lot of them do try very hard to get reviews published in time for book release dates, provided you give them a reasonable period of time (for me 6-8 weeks) to plan the review according to your book release schedule.

Please try not to heckle the reader. The majority have other jobs and obligations and if they keep having to answer emails from you about how the book is going it slows them down. Also, it can be very difficult to have your work criticised and I personally hate writing negative reviews and do so very reluctantly, so if the reviewer does not give you a favourable review, please just move on. There will be other readers who will like it, but if you give up based on a small sample of reviews you may never find those readers. If the same points keep coming up on review it may be prudent to find an alternative proof reader or editor. Unfortunately, it’s not a level playing field and reviewers reading your book are also probably reading big publishing house books too which have been expensively marketted, edited and packaged. The scale of rating your book will be the same as the one they apply to other books, so it isn’t realistic to expect typos, errors and other editing issues to go unnoticed because you’re an independent writer. If you’re charging money for your book, the reader has a right to a certain level of quality from your work.

In summary, marketing your book may not be your most favourite part of being an author but if you’re trying to reach people a little research and information about them will cut down in the time you spend effectively requesting reviews. You may do everything I’ve mentioned above and a reviewer still may not pick up your book, but with several thousand readers/reviewers out there and finding the right ones is definitely rewarding. Organising contact with a group of reviewers who share the same taste in books as you will pay dividends in the long run.

 

To read more of ajoobacats’ work, you can visit her blog, its Facebook presence, or Pinterest., I’m not very good at social media, and made an unsuccessful attempt to create a link to her Twitter presence, but the blog has one that I presume will work. I took the time to read a number of her more recent reviews, and was impressed with her insight. I believe you will feel likewise.

 

Editing/writing life, Sports

Volunteering

2 Comments

One need not read much online, or drive around much, or read many ads, to see how much opportunity there is for volunteer proofreading.

No one will pay to have small proofreading jobs done. Nothing for it but to get used to that reality. In a smart world, every restaurant would have a proofreader on call. His or her job would be to review their ads, new menus, and so on. In the case of immigrant restaurants, especially so. But we don’t live in a smart world, and in many cases the immigrants write better English than the native speakers anyway.

What it means is that volunteer proofreaders have a chance to make a difference. The number one trait for a proofreader is fascist attention to detail, where the proofreader is so eager to find mistakes that if s/he finds none, s/he will assume that s/he missed a bunch, was phoning it in, and must do it all over once more.

As an editor, I always tell my clients that they still need to have my work proofread. I mention that I will contrive my very best to make that proofreader’s job miserable (defined as finding too few errors to fix), but that it still needs doing, and that I can’t take money to do it. To proofread well, I must see the material for the very first time when I sit down to proof it.

The first recipient of my volunteer proofreading services is a fan site for my alma mater’s sports teams. That was an easy one. We all love UW; we all want to see the school and its teams portrayed in the best way. The reporters who cover the sports are volunteers one and all, hard workers who arrive with a love of the school and a given sport, donating their time so that the rest of us can stay connected when the hometown newspaper has lost relevance. We are all on the same side. They sometimes need my help to bring their writing nearer to the standard I expect from those who did time on Montlake. It was stupid to keep rolling my eyes when I had the opportunity to take a hand, and help out my fellow Dawgs.

This may be the way the pro bono aspect of my work goes, moving forward. I would like that.

While we are here, I want to wish all of the ‘Lancer’s faithful followers a Happy New Year. May you all prosper, kick bad habits, begin positive new ones, and avoid traffic tickets.

Book reviews, Editing/writing life

A question about talking about travel writing

6 Comments

The ‘Lancer has a numerically small but engaged audience, otherwise known as ‘a few people who seem to like much of what I post.’ This audience, being mine, deserves my solicitude and affection.

Here’s the question: if I wrote about travel books, would it be out of bounds if I didn’t do up links, and let people search them out the marginally less easy way?

I ask because all the following are true:

  • Travel is the most overrepresented category in my library. In very few areas does my library dominate the shelf selection at Barnes, and this is one of the few.
  • You could learn a shitload about the world from reading these books. That’s how I did it.
  • A lot of the best travel books are not done by Frances Mayes, Paul Theroux, Bruce Chatwin, or someone else who has done a lot of well-paid, pompously-reviewed writing. Nothing against any of those, but your typical travel writer is a one-off who doesn’t write any more. You will never find them without my help.
  • There is a reason that I positioned the travel endcap nearest my recliner in my library (though making sure that history was in clear sight). If I’m going to grab anything to re-read, odds are it’ll be travel.
  • If that’s going to happen–and it will, since I have no intention of being a book hoarder, and am very happy to re-read books–I could turn my readership on to a whole bunch of great stuff. Most of it probably didn’t sell, but the readership of the ‘Lancer is well aware that ‘didn’t sell’ does not mean ‘book sucks.’ It means ‘author couldn’t or wouldn’t market, and publisher didn’t bother.’
  • For me, writing is easy; getting links right is hard. I have to dig it up on Amazon, pare out the extraneous stuff in the link, highlight, copy, highlight link area, paste, hope that the paste was the correct thing, and then test to see if it works. I hate this.
  • I would write more about travel books if links weren’t a basic expectation, and if I didn’t dislike them so.

I solicit commentary on this subject. If I said “screw the links, look it up if you’re interested,” would that be a good trade for more writing?

Editing/writing life

Crouching lower, hitting filing

4 Comments

When we moved to the new place, for some months it was a house-sized Rubik’s Cube. Can’t get some of the furniture out of the garage until we make room for it. Can’t make room for it until we make some decisions about this stuff. Can’t decide about this stuff until we get that area squared away. Can’t do much of anything until we get the floors done. Can’t get the dining room worked up until we do the library. Can’t really get the garage work area in good shape until we get this and that out of the way. Etc., etc., etc.

We have battled through it despite the fact that it sometimes resembles a more comfortable, larger version of a Survivor immunity challenge. And the last obstacle to the library reaching its eventual beautiful state is the boxes of filing that we stacked in the back. Why did we do in such a way? Because we could take them out to the garage, but that would run counter to the goal of making room for my wife to park, yadda, yadda, yadda. But now we have excavated the file cabinet, situated it in my office, and it is time to sort it all out. What to retain, what to shred, what to recycle.

When I put my mind to it, I’m the world’s best office assistant. Fast typist, at least for a male. Natural organizer of files. Never run out of anything important, ever. Have the proper implements to hand, and take good care of them. Spare toner? One of each, on the shelf. Date stamp for bills. Special shelf just for tax stuff I will need next year. Another special shelf for bills, stamps, envelopes, address labels. Can’t stand fingerprints on my screen–if you’re with me in my office and you extend a finger toward it, I will grab a capped pen and offer it to you as a pointer.

For the last few years, in part, I haven’t put my mind to it. The important filing, I dealt with. The rest is a quagmire extending back into my twenties, much of it consisting of piles of paper-I-did-not-see-fit-to-bother-with, which accumulated until Deb or I shoved the whole thing in a banker’s box in hopes it would evaporate without giving off hazardous fumes. Magazines ten years old. Phone books three years old. Statements from banks that no longer exist. Wedding announcements from people who are now divorced. Empty envelopes…kept why for the love of pete? Old grocery lists. Annual privacy statements, which mostly tell me about the ways in which a company feels free to violate my confidentiality. Insurance that expired during the Clinton administration.  Investment statements. Reams upon reams and reams of crap, some of which I should keep.

Enough. I am done with warehousing paper that I don’t need. Will I ever need to review my GTE bills from the 1990s? Why, no; no, I will not. I am going to end up overheating my shredder again before I’m done with this. But it’s do this, and do it now while getting set up, or continue in this inefficient and slothful pattern. It cannot continue.

Oh, and I’m working on three actual work projects, one large and two small, and seeking to keep all three moving with emphasis on knocking the small ones out sooner rather than later. So I edit for a while, until I come to a point where I don’t feel right, then I dig into another banker’s box. File hangers salvaged. File folders’ old writing labeled over, and salvaged. Another big bin of recycling, ready to dump. Did I really keep that self-serving, insulting, condescending nine-page letter from a relative? Why would I ever want to read that again?

Spirits of crap banishment, I herewith summon, stir, and call ye up. Lend me the ongoing strength to continue muddling through this ocean of useless paper, sifting out the stuff that still matters, and make the rest go the hell away.

Editing/writing life

How to get free feedback from your editor friends/family

Leave a comment

My colleagues will kill me. This is like taking pictures in the co-ed team locker room and putting them online.

Here’s the problem: everyone seems to want to write, everyone seems to think his or her personal story is fascinating, and everyone is realizing that self-publishing has perforated the Great Wall of Publishing. Yet most people don’t write very well, most personal stories are no more interesting than anyone else’s, and most people don’t want to do their own marketing.

What is it you want feedback on?

My whole story, damn it! No. Don’t ask your editor friends for that. I’ve gone into the reasons before, but in short, you put your friend in a position where s/he cannot win, and will invariably disappoint you and damage the relationship.

My writing ability. Okay. In that case, ask your friend if s/he will dissect a single paragraph for you as if you were a paying client, with commentary and corrections–with the proviso that it’s all you want, or will want. I think most would go that far.

My storytelling ability. No, can’t do, because that means reading the whole thing. Then I have to explain the difference between writing and storytelling, which are very different skills. Don’t believe me? Okay. How many wonderful oral storytellers do you know who couldn’t even write a decent marquee for Grocery Outlet?

My story/book concept. That’s doable. Offer to digest it in 300 words (not 301, not 299; show some discipline), and ask simply for an evaluation of the strength of the concept, and what it might lack/need.

My kid’s writing. Never, no, absolutely not, and do not ask unless you’re perfectly happy to impair the friendship. It’s the ultimate no-win situation for your friend, simply because you asked.

How to get published. Doable. Take your friend to lunch, saying that you’d like to pick his/her brain on the various publishing choices. Lunch is a fair bribe for that.

How to market a book. Please don’t ask unless you are willing to make effort beyond “self-publish it and hope for the world to discover my greatness.” If you are passionate about marketing, then yeah, ask away, but always remember this. If editors were any good at marketing, or enjoyed it, wouldn’t they be doing that?

Where to get all of the above without paying? I’ll just answer that here. You have to endure a writers’ group. Take time to find a good one, bearing in mind that you will be asked to read and comment on plenty of types of writing you may not enjoy. You don’t like screenplays? Too bad; one hand washes the other. Your ego is fragile? You’ll either get over that, or you’ll leave the group. You find other writers to be narcissistic, pretentious, addicted au bon mot, and conceited? You will just have to deal, because there are probably few “writers’ groups for writers who do not have the customary personality tendencies of writers.” Your best option may be online, where at least you don’t have to send any words you haven’t reviewed and massaged before you commit to them.

If this seems cold, do remember that it emanated from a good number of bad experiences, and from a sincere desire to be helpful in spite of those experiences. It would be unfortunate if one could not construe that as kind at heart, because the easy route was to say nothing at all.

Editing/writing life

Alan Smithees

Leave a comment

I do a lot of work that will never show up on my credit list, on my insistence. I call these Alan Smithees, after the crediting pseudonym used in the film industry.

Why wouldn’t I want to be credited?

  • One reason would be that an author overruled much of my guidance. Since the reader can’t know that, the outcome will reflect on me even if the author ignores all of it–unless I opt not to be credited.
  • In some cases, I consider the subject matter highly controversial, or representing views I consider terminally flawed or even odious, and I don’t mind editing it but I don’t want to be associated with it professionally.
  • In others, I have told the author quite clearly that I don’t think it’s a good or viable story idea, but the author disagrees, and asks that I do my best to help it anyway.
  • Now and then, it’ll occur to me that the author might face repercussions, and I may not want to share in them. Not that I am sure this would shield me, and not that I’m sure a risk could exist, but I’ve run into it.

Me going Alan Smithee doesn’t mean that the author shouldn’t publish the book. I’m not an infallible judge of literary worth. I most often have a better mental picture of how the readership will react than does the author, but not always, and I can’t know or govern how the author will go about marketing. All an Alan Smithee means is that I do not desire print credit for my role.

All the same, when I request not to be credited, a majority of authors find it disconcerting. The authorial psyche tends to contain a fair bit of false bravado masking a lack of confidence, so while the reaction may be very defiant on the surface, in many cases the author has begun to question something, or perhaps everything. One of the chiefest such questions is, of course, whether I’m the right editor for the project. Thus, any time I mention the possibility, I am prepared to see this happen.

While I reserve the right to opt out of credit at any time prior to the book’s going gold, it would be what’s called a ‘bitch move’ for me to spring that at the end without any hint beforehand. The reason should be obvious, but here’s my nutshell version: any situation that might bring on an Alan Smithee is one that it is my job to notice or anticipate at the project’s start, not at the finish. In one noteworthy case, the original writing required a complete rewrite. I advised the author that if s/he rejected edits or added material, the voice would be disrupted–that is, that there’d be inexplicable bursts of grammar, tense, and other mistakes in the final product. In the end, I asked not to be credited because I didn’t want people to see those and conclude that I hadn’t done my job correctly. It wouldn’t mean that, but any quick session with a few Amazon reviews will tell you that most readers don’t realize that the final result doesn’t necessarily reflect the editor’s full influence. The author can overrule me at will, and then I have a decision to make. In the end, if upon final review I do not want my name in the book, the author will have known of the possibility up front, and then made decisions, followed by me making decisions.

In the ideal world, I would always want to have my name in every project in which I was a participant. Until that ideal world comes, we will have some Alan Smithees. And that’s okay.

Editing/writing life

Don’t book-format it yet

Leave a comment

Every ms I get is already gussied up to be as much like a book as possible. Cute typeface. Graphics sometimes inserted. Ornate capital first letters of chapters. Tables, carefully aligned. And the worst, pagination by numerous hard returns. They didn’t know how to use the hard page break, so they just hit Enter over and over until they got a new dotted line.

No good, and here is a simple analogy. Suppose you had to rake leaves and clean eave-troughs before going out to dinner. In what order would you perform the tasks?

  • Put on beat-up work clothing
  • Gather rake, ladder
  • Clean eave-troughs, throwing as much as possible into bin
  • Rake yard and pick up errant eave-trough crud
  • Put away tools
  • Take off filthy clothing
  • Shower
  • Put on nice clean clothes

Yeah. But if you were the typical author, you would:

  • Shower
  • Put on nice clean clothes
  • Gather rake, ladder
  • Clean eave-troughs, throwing as much as possible into bin
  • Rake yard and pick up errant eave-trough crud
  • Put away tools
  • Take off now-filthy, partly damaged, once-nice clothing
  • Shower again
  • Put on more nice clean clothes

Don’t do it this way, all right? All the frippery, fonts, cutesiness, illustrations, inserted graphics, and so on–save them until we have finalized what your book actually says. That’s the difficult and exhausting part, the one where we confer, edit, debate, brainstorm, reconsider, shift, declare war on adverbs, sign a temporary armistice with adverbs, violate the armistice and ambush the adverbs, and so on. The result is the completed, proofread, verified, exhaustively scrutinized full body of what you want to say to the world. Everything we do to it while editing will be hampered by graphics, tables, and cutesy typeface decisions. All that prettying-up can happen once we decide what the book will say.

I’m all in favor of prettying-up. Chefs put work into presentation because it matters. They also do it at the pass, not at the prep table. At most, they carve or shape this or that so that it will fit the future presentation, just as when you are cleaning the eave-troughs, you will try not to cut your forehead wide open by mistake.

Text first. Formatting and beautification later.