On ignoring your editors. · 7:32pm Sep 12th, 2014
Hey folks, time to talk about a lesser known topic when it comes to editing. When you can ignore them. I'd like to thank the always excellent Cold in Gardez for helping make sure this blog is solid.
Before anyone starts yammering about how "If you're going to ignore them, why bother having editors at all?" Let me explain. Everyone writes differently. The first two extremes that come to my mind are Hemmingway and Tolkien. Or in comparison TotallyNotABrony and shortskirtsandexplosions
TNAB has a very concise and almost clipped writing style. He focuses on giving you specific information without a lot of extra. He eschews what he thinks are unneeded descriptions, preferring to focus on what he feels are the salient points without any clutter.
An example is this passage. "The streets had been paved with modern materials, and there were a few cars around. Quaint-looking buildings were slowly being renovated for a more contemporary appearance. The two of them headed to a bar down the street."
There are multiple extras you could add here, you could mention what the buildings more specifically look like, what the weather’s like, who else is around. To this writing style though, those things are considered unnecessary and would only draw attention away from the specific scene and actions he wants the reader to focus on.
SS&E, on the hand, is more about filling in the scene. He uses lots of description and metaphors. He likes to delve heavily into every single aspect of a scene, from the description of the characters, to their body language, to their tone, to their locale. All of this is grist to his mill.
A sample scene: “Rainbow Dash was already asleep, her body curled up in a tight, silken ball. Her petite chest rose and fell in little liquid motions while her tousled mane framed her fuzzy face like a prismatic halo. The last vestiges of sweat had vanished, giving her coat a velvety shine in the dim light wafting softly through the room's thick drapes. Her hooves performed tiny jerking motions while indecipherable murmurs escaped her tired, pursing lips. The tiniest bit of drool formed a damp spot on the couch cushion. Then, with an inward trilling sound, Rainbow stirred, curling her gold-laced sleeves tighter against her face as she drifted deeper into slumber."
As you can see, skirts really focuses on the entire scene here, using plenty of metaphors and similes. Lots of small details like how the drool is pooling on the couch. All minor things to really emphasize the entire scene. You could easily argue a lot of it is unnecessary but to skirts, this is necessary, he wants to help paint an image in your head and give you lots of details.
I picked these two examples to highlight the two ends of the spectrum SS&E and TNAB occupy: the florid and the bare-bones. They do not always write like this; SS&E is sometimes concise, and TNAB has his turns at fancy prose, but on the whole they have developed different styles, and that is what we must do as authors.
Everyone has their own style and most folks will fall somewhere in the middle. Writing is the best way to figure out what your style is and how to best emphasize the things that matter to you in each scene.
This is where editors come in. Editors can be an invaluable resource. Some are great and help catch the little niggly grammar bits and point out parts where your readers might get confused, and some will simply stomp all over your document and tell you everything sucks. In both cases, do your best to be polite (as most folks are doing this for free), and either ask them if they'd be interested in working with you more, or say thanks for the advice, and let them go on their way.
The important thing to remember is that what editors do is suggest things. If they're amazing at grammar and you're merely so-so, it's probably best if you listen to them when they tell you that you've got a comma splice somewhere. When it comes to how you write and what you write though, then you both need to be more flexible.
You could write a scene like,
"Junebug moped disconsolately along the sidewalk, her ears drooping and a heavy frown on her lips. Her eyes were flat and seemed barely able to list themselves to see past her dirty, tangled fetlocks. Her mane was a mess of snarls and split ends, seeming more like a bird had tried to style her hair rather than it being any natural creation. Her tail hung limp and dragged along in the dirt, catching all manner of small stones and sticks. Her saddlebags were fraidd and worn, the gaping holes making it seem as though something had chewed its way out of them and fled for parts unknown."
You think this is great and wonderful. This says without a doubt that Junebug is filthy and miserable and she looks terrible. Every part of her looks like crap. This perfectly shows how miserable and awful she looks and feels. Clearly something wretched has happened to her and this makes it very clear.
Your editor first notes a couple of spelling errors you've made. You've got "list" instead of "lift" and fraidd instead of "frayed" These are facts, and so you should correct them, otherwise people are going to be wondering why Junebug's eyes are tilted oddly.
Their next comment they say: "Also this is way too wordy, omit the parts about how dirty she is and simply say "Junebug was filthy, her mane and tail were limp and matted with dirt." This is much clearer."
This is where you need to remember that it's a suggestion. To you, you want to detail Junebug's plight. You want to show all the little things that display she has had a Very. Bad. Day. If you change it to what your editor told you to do, you won't get to do that. and later on when you mention how there is an actual bird living in her mane, nobody will understand because you didn't point out her mane looks like a bird styled it. There's also the fact that when the rest of your writing reads the way you wrote it, having that one scene where it's very short and concise will be confusing and jarring to the readers. Moreso if you do it in multiple places.
So what you do, is politely talk to your editor and explain why you wrote it the way you did (Want to emphasize her state, there's an actual bird in her mane, etc) and that you'd prefer not to change it, but you'll listen to their reasons. If you're polite and you've a good editor (No planetary alignment needed) they will say "Okay, that's how you write, I understand. I still think the scene drags a little, but that may just be me. Though I would suggest removing the word "disconsolately". We already know she is unhappy because she is moping. Disconsolate means the same thing." To which you can reply "That's a good point, I'll do that" Then you can both skip along and keep working.
The trick is to balance things. You can't ignore everything your editors suggest, if you do that, why bother having them? You also can't take on board every single suggestion, because not only will the story sound a bit confusing and jerky, it won't sound like you. It will sound like someone else, because in fact it is.
If nothing else I've found it takes practice on both sides to work out when to listen to your editor. If you're not sure whether to listen to them, try asking them to explain why they suggested what they did. Or explain why you wrote it the way you did. Sometimes a compromise can be worked, where you get to keep the stuff you like and your readers will be happy that it all makes sense.
I'll be the first to admit I'm not the best out there, and if folks are willing to chime in with more bits of advice I'll gladly include them. I wrote this because I do feel this is an important topic for new writers that often gets overlooked.
If I'm feeling ambitious I'll try and do a post about what I've found that works as an editor, as long as folks keep in mind this is purely opinion and shouldn't be taken as mandatory.
This is a wonderful post, and if I hadn't literally just posted something, I would make a blog post linking it right now. As it is, later this evening I'll post the link.
Thank you for writing this.
I like to take a balanced approach to editors. If someone is editing for me, and they have a suggestion that isn't some sort of game-changer, I generally go with it if I don't feel that strongly about the suggestion. I like a story to have a cohesive style to it, and an listening to those suggestions brings a particular editor's style to the fore.
However, I also believe in my stories, and I wrote them a particular way for a reason. If we have a discussion and I still believe in my vision by the end of it, the story stays the way it is. I have been wrong about that in the past, but I feel like I've been right more often than not.
The danger I've found is that most of the editors I've come across kind of put themselves out there as experts. It can be hard to know who to trust, and it that state, it's difficult to know if you should make the changes or not. I've been burned by so called grammar experts many times when I listened to them and then got a fat list back from EQD asking what the hell I think I'm doing. A lot of that in my early days was from listening to editors that gave me bad advice. Still, it was a learning lesson. I improved, but it was a frustrating way to learn.
I encourage people to get many outside opinions to offset this uncertainty. If I feel one way about a story and another person feels differently, that's not that helpful to me. If I feel one way, but six or seven other people feel differently, well, I'm probably in the wrong. That's been the best method I've found. I have several pre-readers give me an overall opinion, and I compare that against my editor.
This seems to fall into the 'quality before quantity in substance' arguement that's about as old as writing itself.
Hmm, the only conversation I ever have with my editor is reminding her if she doesn't finish by deadline I'll leak the nudes I have of her. Maybe I should try being nicer to her.
As a writer who often... er... "selectively" chooses when to give in to his editor's suggestions for more body language during extended periods of dialogue, I wholeheartedly agree with the content of this post.
You know, Hemingway lived in Toronto for awhile and sold some articles to the local papers while he was there, and they spelled it "Hemmingway," too.
Is that a Canadian thing?
Also:
"There was a hole. In the ground. It was not wet and it was not slimy and the white ends of worms did not wriggle impotently in it. It was not dry and covered in the sand that waits to soak up the blood of the toros. It was a hole meant for comfort. A Hobbit lived there. "
--Across the Misty Mountains and into the Mirkwood
This can be a good reason to have more than one editor crawling around your story too. I have, on occasion, been reading someone's story, and wound up spending more time talking with another editor over the merits of the author's style of prose than I did over errors in grammar. (It's worth mentioning, that your point about being polite also applies to anyone who shares editing responsibilities.)
I think this can go a long way towards giving an author better insight on where the prose is working and where it might not be. Where a passage might need to be cleaned up, and when it just has some quirks of how you write. And of course, if two people who normally take diverging viewpoints on things both agree on something...
That said, just make sure that, if two people reading your story are arguing over a point, don't automatically agree with the one who is defending your passage.
Everyone should see this.
i.imgur.com/c9Qn4kL.png
I wasn't ignoring you! I wasn't at my computer yesterday! But I'm writing now! Please don't beat me.
Oh. Wait. Not that kind of ignoring.
I find that it's most important to get to the root of the issue. It's not so much "change this" that's important. It's the why. Look at your own example.
You have a subtext, a reason why you've done what you've done. So if your editor suggests that you change this (and assuming they're a good editor) one of the issues right off the bat is that they missed the reason. In your hypothetical, part of the reason you set this up is paid off in a joke later on. Maybe they missed the joke. Maybe the joke fell flat.
So at this point, explain yourself—basically the above quote verbatim. See what the editor says. If they're all "ooo, you're right," then it was an honest mistake. If they're all "don't care, this is still bad", well, maybe it does need changing after all. But often, it's the third option: "Hmm okay. I see what you meant, but that wasn't my first read of it. If that's what you're going for, maybe try X instead." This extra insight and ensuing discussion can give you a lot better understanding of your readers' perception and smoothing out the bumps, rather than a mere "replace A with B".
I was going to say something, but Pav already said it better than I would have.
An editor isn't worth his salt if he isn't sharp enough to accurately determine what parts of a description are flab and what parts are carrying their weight. Then again, we're all volunteers here.
More often than not, though, when my advice has gone ignored, it's not because I misunderstood the reason why the author wrote something a certain way. It's because I understood it perfectly, and thought it was a shitty reason to begin with, but the author disagreed.
On one story I reviewed, the guy had written over 120K, and the story had gotten to the point where the main character had finally made a friend. That was pretty much it. I criticized the absurdly slow pace, only to have the author suggest that the story just wasn't for me, and that he wasn't interested in writing at any other pace. Cases like this aren't cases of misunderstanding--they're instances of actual ideological conflict, of points of irreconcilable difference. No amount of communication can overcome a gulf like that, due to which someone can find a story to be acceptably paced which is already longer that the THE HOBBIT but hasn't moved out of Act 1 yet.
Anyway, about this supposed need to preserve one's own style, I think it rather misses the point. Hemingway developed his style not because it was just how he naturally wanted to write or what made him personally feel good. He developed it because he thought he could tell a better story that way. Your style isn't just some incidental thing with only a tangential relation to the quality of your writing. And it doesn't just drop out of the sky, but you must constantly work to create it, always anew. If your style isn't serving the good of your story, you'd better change it. This also implies that different styles can be appropriate for different kinds of stories.
But now I've gone on longer than I had intended.
...Oooh, ooh. One more thing. The most annoying thing to me, as an editor, is when I note down a suggestion as I'm going through the story in google docs, and the author starts real-time hotfixing their sentences and shit before I'm done reading the whole story. Or if they start groveling and kowtowing to the letter of my suggestions, trying to get something that's "technically right" while ignoring style, context, even content. Editing does not work like that. First you have to get the big picture and see what the big corrections are going to have to be, so that you will be able to know what direction the small fixes should take. If you just go in rewriting sentences without a game plan, you aren't going to get anything above mediocre results.
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This, very much so. I like to think of it as the final stage of editing prowness - when an editor is able to take subtext into consideration of his/her feedback. Especially when it's on sticky things like word choice, tone, even jokes, I find that explaining exactly how I felt about it, and forwarding guesses as to what they were trying to achieve, in addition to the Do This, Do That saves both parties a lot of time in back-and-forth.
One example: I looked at someone's fic, where it was basically a really long dream sequence of Spike's wish fulfillment. It didn't work for me because nothing of circumstance happened. I guessed that it was because he was doing it as just descriptive practice. I let him knew both ways, was told that I was more or less right on my guess, and we both left fairly satisfied.
This is kind of why people who triumphantly crow on how EQD, review groups are not to be trusted , I am always right etc. irk me so damn much. It's not your editor's fault you don't know how to interpret feedback, even if said editor can stand to improve in the art of conveying ideas.
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I'd think most of the offenses are the after-effect of bad practice - namely one-size-fits-all advice like "Show Don't Tell", "always use active voice" - and people, though they may try, haven't learnt yet that it doesn't work. Give 'em time.
Interesting. I want to go ahead and tell you now that I didn't really read the entire post. I got the point after the example. Anyway, the problem that many editors go through (except myself most of the time because I understand writing styles) is being able to tell what is stylistic and what is an error, and usually they go with their gut. My gut says that the example is annoying because it constantly pounds in the point to the reader like a hammer on an anvil. But that's the point, so I tell my gut to stop being a critic. This is what I think is the problem more so than anything else.
People forget the levels of reviewers unfortunately, so when someone signs on to be an editor, they think it's all grammar. Technically, it's not grammar at all. Proofreaders do that. Editors are for content generally, and that takes a certain analytical nature and mindset to do well. Honestly, I think many editors are lacking in this aspect. It would honestly help in situations like this, as analyzing the text while you proofread it could save someone.
Enough babbling from me. I agree with this post, and I actually do this myself when I ask others to give me a hand and edit for me.
Interesting blog. Bookplayer directed me here, and it was so worth waiting with writing my raging blog about the Swedish election to read this and write this comment. I've never used an editor, but I've encountered similar situations with proofreaders. I really liked it, and it gave me lots to think 'bout.
I've been known to do editing work now and then for people, and I've enjoyed the help of editors for my own writing from time to time.
As an editor, I don't expect to get 100%of the errors that exist, nor do I expect to be able to transform garbage into gold. The only thing I offer is suggestions and feedback. I feel my job is to read, think about what I read, then hold a conversation with the author so they can tell their story more clearly. I don't get offended if my suggestions are discarded. They're just suggestions and the author is the boss.
As a writer, my interest is in getting the kind of help I provide when I edit for others. I want to know if the image on my head is coming off the paper into the reader's head with as little loss as possible. All authors should know what their vision is.
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Copy editors do grammar (and spelling, style, and accuracy). Proofreaders take the text after the last round of editing, and the typeset text, and look for discrepancies between them (missing, extra, or mangled text), and for formatting errors. Proofreaders are also likely to spot spelling and possibly grammatical errors that make it past the copy editor(s), but it's not technically their job.
As one more edited against than editing... no, wait. Anyway, my take is that:
- the most important editing is not stylistic, but has to do with story structure, themes, symbolism, the alignment of characters' traits and their function in the story, things like that
- more writers listen too little to that kind of editing than too much
This has some really good points. Bookmarked.
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Um, Um...thank you.
Heh, well I did once post a blog about how to get your point across in as few words as possible.
2590260 Which is why I knew you were the perfect choice.
Back when I first started writing Ponyfics, I heard something that I've always carried with me. I was speaking with an editor about this same exact topic, and he said to me: "I'd be more wary of the writer who takes all of his editor's advice than the one who takes none of it."
While editors are wonderful (quite possibly the most wonderful people in the universe), there comes a time when you have to be true to your own writing, and understand that sometimes you know what's going to be best for your own piece. Glad to see someone else agrees.
2825984 Absolutely! Editors are invaluable, but you as the author is invaluable too. You have to find a happy medium.