Tag Archives: fiction editor

Editing/writing life, Social comment

Editorial Maverick: So you want to write a book?

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Cool. What’s first?

It doesn’t begin with banging the keys, which is not to say I discourage that–but it would probably work better if you gave it some thought first. If your story idea is boiling over and running out your ears, and you want to get it on paper as though you were under the lash, very well–but early on, at some point, when you have satiated that urge for the day, give these things some thought.

Be honest with yourself. Why do you want to do this? What drives you? Common reasons are money, recognition, bucket list, inner personal need, service to others, revenge upon others, making people laugh, therapy, making spines tingle, and so on; there are as many more as there are people. I suggest writing down three if you can summon them, using all the self-honesty you can muster. All motives that don’t lead you to get into serious trouble you cannot handle are okay.

Your motives are important because they will inform everything you do. If money matters, for example, you’ll have to have a marketing plan. I divide books into vanity and commercial projects, and I do it this way: If it has a marketing plan that intends to turn a profit, it’s a commercial project. Until it has such a plan, it’s a vanity project because there is minimal prospect for profit. “Hoping I get noticed by New York” is not a marketing plan.

Please don’t misunderstand: I love vanity projects. They are liberating and often powerful. Many are books I would read for enjoyment. What they aren’t is moneymakers. All the passion in the world is not a marketing plan. And if you don’t much love marketing, well, you have company and it begins with me. It is not my forte and I do it because I must, because one of the reasons I want to edit is to earn. I groove on helping people achieve their dreams, teaching them to avoid common problems, and becoming more of a friend than an editor. That is why I’m the Editorial Maverick: I don’t do it the way most people do it.

(I’m not joking at all. If you were to read some editors’ groups, you’d see why. One can only take so much “Edibuddies please help me Ive been struggling for six hours where to put this comma and CMoS doesn’t tell me!” Jeez. If you can’t make a simple decision about punctuation without help from a huge book, you are either too poorly read or too fearful to be an editor. Decide. That’s why they hire you. If they wanted it screwed up, they could do that without you.)

Note that nowhere am I saying you need to start by planning out your book. There are slang terms for those who advocate just writing, and those who create flow charts to map out the story. I don’t care which you do. It should be whichever works. What I am saying is that, while you are doing whatever you do at the start, make time to be honest about your motives and goals. It is very difficult to set goals without motives, and it is very difficult to achieve goals without setting them.

Once you have a self-honest compilation of your reasons for wanting to write a book, you can decide whether it should be a moneymaker or a hopefully-break-evener. Because if it’s the former, you need to start the marketing plan as soon as you decide to write a book. If it’s the latter, of course, you are liberated from considerations related to the former. Do as you like and feel no shame–it’s just fine.

Whatever you do, if you begin with self-honesty about motives and goals, and own those decisions, will be fine.

Book reviews, Editing/writing life

Editorial Maverick: why did that book get brutal reviews?

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If you’ve been reading here very long, you know by now how stupid it is for a book reviewer to snip: “Well, obviously she should fire her editor,” or “Duh. Clearly she didn’t hire an editor.” The reviewer cannot possibly know how much editorial guidance might have existed and been disregarded, nor what sort of editing might have been sought or employed. When you read that review, just mentally mark that reviewer down as not knowing what he’s talking about.

If that reviewer understood anything about the different editing modes, about the way the relationship goes, or had at least some basic insight beyond ‘me no like book,’ they’d show it.

Here is the takeaway in context: All those truly awful self-published books you’ve seen, been cajoled into trying, bought at SF con dealer rooms, ended up with at used bookstores, came up on searches and looked cool enough to try, then turned out unreadable? Many of their authors considered an editor, then talked themselves out of it with:

  • Oh, no. No, no, no. I am not paying $1000 for you to mess with my baby! (So you’ll raise the baby, but you won’t get it medical care. Okay.)
  • Sorry, but I like my original better than your sample edit. (That, or you got a serious shock when you saw all that “red ink” and decided you need someone who “believed in your work,” that is to say, didn’t know how much help it really needed.)
  • This would damage my unique style. (Yes. Your hyperdependence on passive voice, your head-hopping, and your grammatical incontinence could be considered a ‘unique style.’ And if you are fond of all that, I wish you the best.)
  • I can find someone on Sixerr or Sevenerr or whatever who’ll do it for half that. Can you match? (Can? Yes. Will I? Zero chance, and I’ll probably decline the project at any price after that. Anyone shopping purely on price is not my target market.)

You get the idea. It’s all about money, fear, ego, or some combination of these. My rejoinders (internal to my own mind, not articulated) might seem blunt, but do remember that blunt is part of the benefit. If they don’t want that, I get it, and I accept. We can both move on.

The reality is that most people put weeks, months, or years into a book from which they hope to make money, yet rarely choose the full benefits of professional feedback.

Most such books are lost in the sea of mediocrity. They didn’t have to be.

Editing/writing life

Editorial Maverick: forgetting how not to know

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It’s a problem in some non-fiction, but it’s endemic in fiction. It is worse in semi-autobiographical fiction, because the au “experienced” the events and “saw” the places and people. The same effect occurs when the au has been working on the story (in mind, on paper, on computer, wherever) for a very long time. They “know” all of it so well that they can’t get back to where the reader will be: knowing none of it until told.

While it’d be great if authors learned how to overcome this, most will never make the effort. As long as they are working on details they lived, or might as well have lived given how long they’ve been crafting the story, they will “know.” The best way I can think of to un-know is what I call the readercam: the focus position of the reader’s view. Decide where the readercam is on this scene, and think about how much of it must be described to help your mom understand it over the phone. I can tell them to do that until I’m winded, though, and few ever will.

And that’s okay, because it does make my role essential. As long as I have offered my best professional guidance toward a better outcome, if the client declines it (as in “nah, I’d rather just let you catch that kind of thing”), that’s okay too. And I’m not just saying that because it means I have paid work to do. Another reason is that such worries can get in the way of creative flow. Let’s ask the question. Which would you rather have written?

  • A brilliant story with piles of mechanical flaws, perspective issues, and grammatical errors?
  • A dull story executed to scholarly perfection?

Yeah. And that’s why I don’t get too worked up because someone tore through cranking out the ms in a creative whirlwind: I represent the stabilizing, logistics-handling, dull repairperson who cleans up after the party. I only get worked up if the story is dull, stupid, etc. I can fix most of the bad habits and problems that come from the first, especially if the client realizes the situation (I’ll help; oh, how I will help) and embraces editing as a liberating force for creativity. The second will still be a dull story unless there are major changes that make it no longer the au’s original story.

And at that point, editing is not the issue.

Editing/writing life

Editorial maverick: phases of writing growth…and lazy habits

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I’ve observed three distinct phases of writing growth/evolution.

The first phase is what I’d expect from a high school sophomore who does not plan to graduate with distinction; mostly intelligible, but with enough basic problems that fixing bad habits are a ways off. It mixes up to/two/too, can’t get the possessive apostrophe right, and doesn’t know what it’s doing with punctuation. It sometimes believes that more exclamation points are more impactful!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! At other times, it believes in no punctuation, nor even para breaks.

It’s awful, but it will suffice in life for basic needs. For many people perhaps that’s satisfactory. (Maybe they’re brilliant at plumbing. Great. You hire me to write important stuff for you, and I’ll hire you to do plumby stuff. All good.) That might seem heretical, but becoming a quality writer is not easy for most people, and until people come to me insisting that the first tier is acceptable for professional published writing, we have no quarrel.

The second phase writes clearly enough, but its lazy habits keep it stuck in the middle. It overuses adverbs. It does not understand what’s wrong with comma splices. It loves italic emphasis, ellipses, em dashes, passive voice, and various other common writing weaknesses. It ranges too far afield, too often, from the straightforward declarative sentence. Most first-time novelists arrive in this stage, and many never exit it before they self-publish.

The third phase has learned to avoid the second’s failings. Up to this point, editing can only partly be about content because there are many mechanics to address. The term “cognitive load” comes into play, because one is pouring on so many other teaching points that some clients could become overwhelmed with second-phase and third-phase feedback. In this stage, the writer can write well, and our focus is on the fine points: pacing, clarity, word choices, flow, and so on.

For those seeking to exit the second, here are things to fix and how to fix them:

Question every non-dialogue adverb, with the goal of choosing a better verb. People told you to burn your thesaurus; this is why you disobeyed.

A comma splice occurs when the comma divides a sentence into parts that could stand alone, it looks like this. Unlike most parts of speech, which have their roles and places and jobs, this is an error pure and simple.

Permit yourself one non-dialogue italic emphasis per 25,000 words.

Permit yourself one non-dialogue ellipsis per 20,000 words.

Permit yourself one or two em dash constructions per chapter. And begrudge.

Launch a frontal and flank attack on non-dialogue passive voice. Attempt to recast every last instance. Surrender only when there is no other option, such as there is no definable subject to assign.

As hinted earlier, dialogue is different. Rules for dialogue and internal monologue (thoughts) are looser because people think and speak otherwise than they write. That doesn’t meant that all the rules are suspended, but it does mean more patience for italics, ellipses, and so on. You have heard the breezy boast “I write like I talk,” as if that’s something to be glad about, but you might not have heard my rejoinder: “Too bad, because people don’t read the way they listen.” Broken Dolly Syndrome ensues. And yet, as with everything but those damn comma splices, there’s a time and a place. Dialogue and IM, treated as spoken, can be more “write like I talk” because they are talking in some form. Of course, one really means “write like your characters talk,” but people get the idea.

When I get a manuscript, I must figure out how much of phases one and two remain in play. Phase one writers rarely end up hiring me, because my report says that their writing needs a lot of work, and they either don’t want to do that work or didn’t want/expect that answer. Phase two writers are likelier to hire me, especially if I can show them how to get to phase three (I can). Phase three writers are the toughest and most rewarding, because they ask questions. Lots of questions. They want to know why. I must not tell a phase three writer to do anything unless I’m ready with the reasoning, because odds are they will ask me for it.

This is good. This is how I grow in my own work.

Editing/writing life, Social comment

Editorial Maverick: the unlamented death of lolling

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I refer, of course, to the unlamented abbreviation “lol.” I have a politically incorrect term for its addicts, one I will decline to share in a public presentation.

At first it was just a fun thing. Someone would private message something funny, and it was shorthand for saying that one was laughing aloud. All right. And then the cancerous node metastasized.

Soon it became the stand-in for a comma or even a period:

  • j: hi there
  • person: hello lol
  • j: how goes?
  • p: not so good lol
  • j: what’s wrong?
  • p: oh lol my car broke down on teh freeway lol and i had to have it toad lol now were getting evicted lol not sure what were gonna do lol maybe its time to get on the pole lol
  • how is this funny? doesn’t sound very amusing
  • i know rite lol

At that point I had to start controlling myself. Not only was it used when nothing was funny, but it made writing all but unreadable. I just stopped encouraging extensive conversations where I’d have to shovel through a lot of lolling. Now, I don’t worry about spelling errors, grammar, even case when typing in texts and private messages. Some people seem to imagine that editors spend every waking moment finding fault with their friends’ writing. If we did that, two things would happen. One, we’d be exhausted–too tired to do our work after all that free editing. Two, the problem would solve itself because no one would talk to us. All I care about is being able to make sense of the person I’m talking with. When something gets in the way of that, it also is exhausting.

But lolling seems to be in long-term care and about ready for hospice, and this would seem a perfect time for vocabulary assisted suicide. We don’t need this. We have emojis and other little face images that might not technically be emojis, but grouping them all under that term is convenient. The end of lolling seems at hand.

I won’t be attending the funeral, but neither will I grieve.

Editing/writing life

Editorial Maverick: don’t format it

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One key aspect of transforming a manuscript (ms) into a book is formatting, sometimes called typesetting (I’m sure the term will be with us long after the last ink-stained hands have fallen still and cold). This is how it goes from Word format to something you can print as a book. It can mean inserting photos, cute drop caps (the extra large letter to begin a chapter), graphics for segment breaks (say, a cattle brand for a book on ranching life), and all that other prettying up. A basic version can be had by self-publishing through CreateSpace or something like it; if you want it fancier, you hire a formatter or figure it out yourself. Formatters are generally expert in Word and understand how the conversion tools work, knowledge only a few people need.

Whatever you do, please do not book-format your ms as you go.

For one thing, writers do not automatically know how to use Word’s features correctly. I say Word because I don’t work on G-word docs; I’d sooner work on a plain text file (which I’ll bring into Word anyway so I can use change tracking and commenting). If the ms is in G-word, well, I’ll work on it when it’s sent to me as a .docx file. What it means is that people wanting to line things up, make them all nice, will impose all sorts of oddness on the ms. Not knowing how to indent, they’ll just use tabs, or worse yet, hit the space bar five times. Not knowing how to insert a hard page break, they’ll just bang hard returns (the Enter key) until they’re at the top of the next page. These are problems because the editing process shoves everything around. It is almost certain to mess them up; lines might be inserted, margins changed, and so on.

The little graphics and other cutesiness (which I call it at this stage, because it belongs in the formatting stage; here it’s just clutter) are as bad. They make editing harder. If that isn’t enough to discourage novice authors, let’s try money. Anything that makes editing harder also makes it more expensive. So here’s the core of it: Why would you put in extra work that you will certainly pay to have undone, and on top of that, have to do it all again later? This does not make sense.

Here’s the proper order of Good Actions. First, write. If you’re going to indent paras, indent them using Word’s Indent feature; if you’re going to break pages at chapter end, just use Word’s hard page break (Ctrl-Enter). To break chapters into segments, just stick in a simple placeholder, for example three asterisks separated by spaces. Whatever you do, focus on writing, not cosmetics. Get the text as good as you can make it. Self-edit until it wrenches your soul…then let your editor go to work. You can use italics at this point, but don’t make typeface changes. Use something straightforward, typically Times Roman or Calibri or Arial. Left margin justified, right margin ragged. Leave placeholder markers for graphics to go in later, if you’re going to put in charts or photos or whatnot.

Many seem to feel that the decision whether to single space, one-and-a-half space, or double space is a Momentous Choice. Nah, not here. Your editor can undo it in five seconds, as long as it takes to Select All and go into the Line Spacing. What I usually do is edit with single spaces or 1.5, but what matters is what I use if I do a print review. I might edit it in single, then review and red-pen a copy in double. Costs me a little more in paper and ms heft, gives me more room for editing marks and insertions. At the end, I can convert it back to the way the au sent it to me.

If you’re going to try for traditional publishing, also called trad-pub (, then I don’t really understand the logic, but I will support you as you) then prepare to send queries and submissions to people who might or might not show an interest. If that’s the plan, then either follow the publisher’s submission specs or go with the industry standards.

If you are going it alone, then we’re probably still doing this together. When you have finalized the content, by whatever handing back and forth of the football you and your editor have determined should occur, then it’s time for formatting. Formatting creates galleys–probably final images of what will be published if the proofreading doesn’t find any errors. Any formatting mistakes, typos, alignment issues, and so on can be caught and fixed at this point.

Here’s another reason for this. The hardest part, for most people, is just getting it all down on e-paper. For some people it takes a decade or even two. However long it takes, the last thing you want to do as you attempt to express your thoughts or tell your story is to run around making little cutenesses. It makes the writing harder, and if there’s one thing writers don’t need it is to make writing harder.

Have you ever had someone look at you and tell you that you just unraveled months of frustration that drove them to sleepless nights, vodka, and feelings of deep inadequacy and hopelessness? People whose work is to help people get that experience. It is a special one.

If what you write has flaws and you can’t figure them out, That’s Why You Have An Editor. Step back fifteen yards from scrimmage and punt. Tell your editor the parts you don’t like, where you’d like special attention and input. Sure, you can self-edit, and in most cases you should do some of that before you send it off to a pro. But if your self-editing is bogging you down, your work is harder than it needs to be. The reason you have an editor is to help you get the text into suitable syntax, flowing well, reading consistently, and making sense. Get those benefits. Let your editor help. Get what you’re paying for.

Believe me, your editor wants it that way.

Editing/writing life

Editorial Maverick: action scenes

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Why are action scenes so hard to write?

It might not seem that way when you see the material in published form, but it is quite probable that most of what you’re seeing was once an action salad. I doubt that any two editors help fix such situations in the same way.

Far as I can tell, the most common problem with action scenes is over-familiarity on the author’s part. Think of this: You have been working on a fiction novel for five years. Within the first quarter of the ms, there is a complicated fight scene that starts two new story arcs. You have played this scene out in your mind two dozen times as you have gone over and over your ms. You know what “happened.” You have known it so long you can no longer imagine not knowing it.

Your reader doesn’t know any of it until you tell her. How big was the room? Your first gut response might be: “Uhhhh…big enough for the action.” You probably wouldn’t go with that answer, but it is probably the truest one. Your reader has to be told that, especially if the space constrains the action. She must be told everything that is pertinent–but not too much, because…

The next most common problem is over-description. Too much detail: The living room had old-school 1960s tongue-and-groove paneling with a ceiling fan, a brown leather sofa, two leather recliners, a fireplace, and two lamps on end tables. Could any of those details possibly help your reader through the action? Possibly the fireplace, especially if someone grabs the poker. The fan? Sure, if it constrains the action. The other furniture? Minimally, if it too constrains the action. The sofa’s upholstering probably doesn’t affect the outcome; the fact of a sofa might. Does every stroke and feint and hit matter? No, and trying to include all of them makes excruciating reading. This is overcorrection, and it is much easier to fix than omitted essential details. We can always whittle it down to the basics, a few short descriptive strokes that are just enough to help our reader through fast-paced suspense and action.

She likes that, and we want her to have it. Let’s not forget to think of her. She bought the book! Bless her with a mighty blessing! We begin by thinking of her as wonderful, a customer we very much wish to satisfy. We don’t want her bogged down in detail or confused by events. We want to help her. If she puts the book down in frustration, we lose.

There is a third problem: unrealistic action. Take for example a combat situation involving multiple troop movements and weapon types. Some authors have actually been part of troop movements in battle; most haven’t and are glad of it. Fine. How do we sort this all out so it comes out reading plausible?

When in doubt, I make a miniature wargame. I rough out a map, sketch in some basic rules, and borrow counters (small square cardboard pieces from my wargame library). I designate who is what and how many, decide which side initiates the action, and start walking through the battle. Some are easier. If it’s WWII, for example, my old Avalon Hill Squad Leader game is my friend because I won’t even have to make up rules or use my imagination regarding what the counters represent. I’ve drawn a scene on graph paper and used pennies and nickels for the opposing sides, with different dates to designate that this is Joe, this is Lakeisha, this is José; these others are the thugs, and the 1969 nickel is the one with the pistol; everyone else on that side has a switchblade. Anyone who has ever played role-playing games is well equipped to sketch out a game of an encounter and walk the characters through it. Anyone who has not probably knows someone who has.

Yes, they’re hard to write. They are also hard to edit, but the editing is easier than the guidance. The hardest part is conveying to someone whose brain contains indelible footage of “how it happened” which parts are implausible, which are incomprehensible, and which are illogical (a polite way of saying the character isn’t dumb enough to do what the author has them doing). I came up with another tactic, which I call the readercam.

Put your reader in the room, invisible and non-corporeal; Nothing can interact with her, and she stands in the corner with a ringside view. Now put a video camera on her shoulder and see the action through it. What’s visible through the readercam? Of that which is visible, describe what is germane. Use the readercam to define her perspective and field of vision. When need be, change the camera’s aim. This does not mean adding exhaustive detail of a new wall, for example, but it might mean that new obstacles come into play. If they were already described, those bits of description now pay their way. You see the principle, which is that you focus on what affects the action and you don’t move the vantage without some good reason.

And yet you don’t want to over-describe for one more reason: You will be taking your reader’s fun away. She doesn’t want you to tell her every little detail; she wants to tell the story as her mind sees it. How she does that is purely her choice and business, and you’re there to help her but not do it for her. Your work is not to tell her every detail. It is to give her enough roughed-in information to let her mind animate the action in a plausible and exciting way. This is why authors often won’t clarify the way character names should be pronounced. The pronunciation  likely won’t change events; why not let your reader say it however she likes? Is it LEGG-oh-lass or le-GO-less in Tolkien? Who gives a rip? How the reader pronounces the author’s names is none of the author’s business.

The author has more pressing business, such as writing a decent action scene. If you’re the reader, and you just read a banging action scene that had you in suspense while making you want more, more, more, that scene probably didn’t spring into its current form on first draft. Unless done by an author with a natural intuitive gift, it probably didn’t gel on the fourth or fifth. And the long the ms took, the farther away from novelty went the author’s mind. In time, he forgot not knowing.

If he had a competent editor, of course, that got fixed.

Editing/writing life

Editorial Maverick: adverbs

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Adverbs? But Stephen King talks about them like readers talk about his antagonists!

Right?

Right. And he is–but it’s easy to take it too far. Let us start with the fact that not all adverbs end in -ly (and not all -ly words are adverbs), so spotting them doesn’t just require a document search. One must read the writing with some application of basic grammar. An adverb, as most of you probably know, is a word or combination of words that modifies a verb:

She ran very quickly down the sidewalk.

If you think like me, of course, you saw the problem with that sentence in short order. The adverbs do not pay their way; a better verb could replace them, and one could even argue they are redundant. The better verb would be childishly easy:

She sped down the sidewalk.

That’s your basic test and correction in simplest form.

I let more adverbs go than perhaps most editors do. I brought up the part about -ly endings because that’s the sort of simple dogmatic crap that one might get from the not insignificant population of crummy editors who would be paralyzed without spellcheck, grammar check and word searching. When I see your adverb, I ask myself whether a better verb could subsume its meaning. I also ask whether the adverb adds anything of substance to the verb (handy mnemonic for writers, perhaps). In my earlier example, she’s already running; would we say she ran slowly? Kind of doubt that. We make clear she’s on the sidewalk, so the default presumption is she’s on foot; we can trust the reader to infer this specific of “to run,” especially as there would be surrounding context to inform us she isn’t driving a Harley down the sidewalk, or doing something else odd. The only thing we got from the original adverbs was that the author wanted to make clear she was seriously booking down that sidewalk. We have many fine options:

She sprinted down the sidewalk.

She dashed down the sidewalk.

She raced down the sidewalk.

How would you choose? If this were a developmental edit, you’d explain this to the client and ask them to hunt up a better verb. In developmental editing, I don’t correct everything. It works far better to correct a few examples of a writing misbehavior, define it clearly, and encourage the client to hunt down and repair the rest herself. While a part of her might be cussing you and/or crying in frustration, another part of her knows she’s growing. The editor is helping her reach her potential.

After you’ve staked your fiftieth adverb, the lesson has either begun to sink in or it hasn’t, and we have an uptake problem. When you picture writers, you probably picture retreats full of brilliant remarks and an urgent need not to have to explain any references–the intellectual big kids. That stereotype exists (and it might surprise you to learn that it doesn’t really extend into editing so much; maybe we have less to prove), but there’s another subset that just doesn’t improve. You can teach until you run out of red pens and they still don’t get it. I’m not mocking them because they are to writing as I am to calculus, but they do exist.

One way to help such a person is with a substantive edit, which aims to create text that is ready for proofreading. Maybe the client has just decided that she doesn’t need to write better as long as her editor is willing to fix it up, and if so, that’s a valid choice. As long as she’s been told of the problem, with explanations and encouragement in good faith and directed at her best interests, the editor must live with the client’s choices or tell her to find a new editor. I’ve had to do that before, and it’s not fun, but I can’t always live with the client’s choices. When I can’t, the client deserves someone who can.

So how is this mavericky? Because I’m somewhat more permissive. First I try to improve on the adverb. If it adds something, and I can’t improve on it, it serves a purpose and should stay–but my definition of “adds something” might differ from that of others. There are times to use a redundant adverb for effect; dialogue uses redundant adverbs all the time; sometimes it just brings a different flavor. I’m by no means the only editor who looks at it this way. To my mind, the purpose of writing is to communicate with an audience. No two audiences are identical, nor are any two writing voices, and we handle this by reading the writing. We don’t answer it by quoting a reference.

Lastly, the people have spoken. I asked the Facebook page with regard to changing this page’s title to “The Editorial Maverick.” The logic is that “The ‘Lancer,” while perhaps cool, is very dated and doesn’t even tell the casual observer what I do nowadays. People might think I’m anything from an SCA equestrian to a dermatologist (both possibilities actually came up in the conversation). While it was not unanimous, support for the change was overwhelming. I plan to retitle this page just before the end of 2022. No action is needed by subscribers and nothing else will change; same URL, same style of content, same maverickiness (perhaps even more, with the rep to uphold).

I do plan to focus a little more on work-related content rather than the self-indulgence I have shown over the decade and more I’ve been at this. At heart, it is supposed to be marketing. If I don’t use it for marketing at least some of the time, it’s not serving its designed aim. I look forward to your continued readership at The Editorial Maverick in 2023 and beyond, and I thank you for your past readership and support.

Hail the new.

Editing/writing life

Editorial Maverick: commas

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Some of the strongest articles of faith in the style guides concern commas. You must blah blah blah. You must not blah bah blee blah blah. People get militant. If you fail to do it their way, you are wrong and bad and just simply incorrect, and you probably shoplift at dollar stores.

There are rules for commas, and they aren’t stupid. Famous SF author C.J. Cherryh was the first one I heard say never to follow a rule off a cliff. An observation that goes with it is that one should know the rules in order to know when to break them.

I agree with that. To me, the question is whether bending or breaking the rule will make the words read better. Not be more correct; read better. Most of the time, writing reads better when one follows the rules. I’m more concerned with bumps in the flow. Sometimes the addition or omission of a comma creates a little jolt in the flow, like the feeling you get when you’re driving through Spokane (Washington) and the entire city is plagued by road damage and repairs. There are huge steel plates covering craters that could have been made by incoming mortar fire, and every time one hits one, there’s a jarring bump. If you have never driven in Spokane, you’re in for an experience.

In editing, one of my goals is to help remove jarring bumps that serve no purpose. I’ll encourage clients to use commas not where Chicago or Grammarly says they go, but where they read best. There is large and welcome overlap there, but in a conflict between rule nitpicking and successful written communication, I don’t see how I can take any side but the latter. Is it not about the audience?

Therein lies the point: Who’s the audience? Who would read this? If it were an audience of editors and grammarians, the comma rules would matter far more because what jolts experts differs from what jolts a layperson. How many authors seeking editors are writing for an audience of editors? None of them have yet brought their projects to me–but if they did, it would be a factor. Because that’s what would best reach that audience.

There is one comma area in which I have yet to see a single case for endorsement: the comma splice. When a comma connects two stand-alone sentences, we call this a comma splice. A comma splice always looks bad, their use is a terrible habit. (See? Hideous.) Depending on the situation, it might be better to break the sentence into two; to use a semicolon; even to use a colon. What one can’t do is stet [‘let stand as set’–editor-speak for ‘ignore this edit’] a comma splice. It cannot stand.

But if I ever learn of a situation that would make a comma splice look like effective communication, rather than the brain-shaking jolt that it is, I’ll rethink. That’s what an editorial maverick does–use their brain rather than just quote a book.

Editing/writing life

Editorial Maverick: introduction

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Would people want to read about editing? If it means reading lamentations about agonizing for eight hours trying to figure out where Chicago says to put the comma, I’m guessing not. But I work differently from many editors.

For example, unless the assignment directly involves a style manual, I regard Chicago and AP as suggestion books rather than bibles. It’s that simple. To many editors, that would be heresy. Here is the logic: The list of purposes for the English language is varied, vast, and inexhaustible. The purpose of writing is to communicate information to a given audience. Does a former gang leader write in all lower case? Besides utterly defying the style guides, won’t that limit the audience? It might, but the question I would ask is not whether the sacred style guidelines had been profaned. I would ask whether this method was effective in reaching the desired audience, and why.

You cannot imagine the crickets I have heard in this career when I have asked the basic question: “Who’s the intended audience?”

Take the aforementioned gangster book. I would ask the client why he (I refer here to an actual book I once read for pleasure, not an actual client) felt this style would best reach his audience–which, by the way, was exactly who? We’d talk about that. I’d hear out his case, consider it. If I disagreed, I’d explain why. We’d have a conversation. I’m the editor who might be receptive to subversive style methods if they were effective, so I’d have an open mind.

In such a case, it usually comes down to whether the major style variation is lazy or deliberate. If lazy, the short version is “I think my shitty is as good as others’ polished.” It has no aforethought, just “I don’t want to grow.” But if it’s deliberate, it’s written that way not because their basic ceiling is shitty, but because that reaches out to the intended audience in ways I might never understand if I’m not part of the target market. I have to be open to that.

That’s part of what makes me the Editorial Maverick, I guess.