Copy Edits are, in the best of times, a nerve-wracking proposition, because CEs, unlike one’s own marvelous, wonderful, thoughtful, brilliant Editor, are professional nitpickers.\u00a0\u00a0 If you don’t have a nitpicker mentality yourself (and most storytellers don’t) and if you have a feel for the needs of fiction as opposed to, say, a sociology textbook (and most storytellers do) the more rigid CEs will drive you batty.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Good CEs, as I’ve said before, are pearls beyond price and save your bacon.\u00a0\u00a0 Not-so-good CEs become embroiled in trying to rewrite your work to suit their notions, and in the process miss actual mistakes they should catch.<\/p>\n
I’ve never suggested that a CE’s work is easy–it’s not, especially in fiction, and most especially in fiction that, by its nature, does not adhere to conventional vocabulary, spelling, and language use.\u00a0\u00a0 Really good fiction CEs–and really good SF\/F CEs–are rare.<\/p>\n
But from the writer’s point of view, there’s nothing he\/she can do…at least, I haven’t figured out how to a) find a CE who will fix my actual mistakes while leaving my story and my style alone, and b) convince a publisher to hire that person to work on my stuff.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 As a result, I’ve had CEs of the intolerably bad to the amazingly good sort, and I never know what I’m going to get next.\u00a0\u00a0 (One of the best CEs\u00a0 I’d had was fired by the publisher for another reason.)<\/p>\n
Bad CEs think all writers are arrogant ignoramuses who resist CE changes because they’re, well, arrogant.\u00a0\u00a0 On the contrary, I’m far from the only writer who is delighted when a CE catches something that needs to be caught (John had blue eyes in chapter 18 but brown eyes everywhere else.\u00a0\u00a0 The sentence has “the the house” instead of “the house.”\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 An unusual word–not a new vocabulary entry for this story–shows up twice or three times in one paragraph, when it’s not intended as emphasis.)\u00a0\u00a0 I’m doubly delighted if the CE has grasped that grammatical errors in dialog are part of characterization, and that the rhythm of each sentence may well be intentional and purposeful, so shoving an extraneous three-syllable word into it is not a great idea.<\/p>\n
Fix the obvious real mistakes (the continuity errors, the duplicated words), question anything else that bothers the CE (leaving me room to write in the margin)\u00a0 and (except for typos, duplicated words, continuity errors) leave dialog alone.\u00a0\u00a0 Do not add material–query with the perceived need for this material.\u00a0 (“Not clear if A is still in the house or outside”)<\/p>\n
I’m just starting the copy edits.\u00a0\u00a0 So far…not sure.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 CE added a word I didn’t think necessary, especially as, in the opening scene, it would be inappropriate to define it and it isn’t significant in what happens.\u00a0 There’s use and explanation later on.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And a few other things.\u00a0 OTOH, I don’t have to agree with the CE always (or often) but I stop and think through every mark, often leaving one if I’m not strongly opposed.\u00a0 So every mark takes time and thought (and then, if I put in my STET or my fix to a query, more time.)<\/p>\n
You can’t ever tell how it’s going to go until you’re 20-50 pages in.\u00a0\u00a0 So now my nose is on the grindstone again.\u00a0 This is\u00a0 good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Copy Edits are, in the best of times, a nerve-wracking proposition, because CEs, unlike one’s own marvelous, wonderful, thoughtful, brilliant Editor, are professional nitpickers.\u00a0\u00a0 If you don’t have a nitpicker mentality yourself (and most storytellers don’t) and if you have a feel for the needs of fiction as opposed to, say, a sociology textbook (and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[94,52,5],"tags":[107,50],"class_list":["post-1207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-echoes-of-betrayal","category-editing","category-the-writing-life","tag-the-writing-life","tag-writer-as-editor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1207"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1207"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1207\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1210,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1207\/revisions\/1210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}