Editing Rant

[Harry Dewulf]

Yes, there are writers who are so good in other ways, such natural storytellers, that a lot is forgiven. I just read a book I'd put under that category, but banking on you -- the general you -- being one of those authors is foolish. Excusing any bad writing habit or unprofessional behavior because Successful-Guy-Does-It is often the kiss of death to at least one possible path for improvement and to ever be in the same league as successful guy.

These folks are rare, and as you say, to try to imitate or emulate them is doomed to failure, if nothing else then through comparison.

I'm living in the same world with the same sloppy posts and text messages, and adding my own word salads as I go, but that doesn't mean that I'm looking for more bad writing and willing to pay for the privilege. While there is no such thing as perfection, the concept that a writer would do the bare minimum they can get away with is revolting, and antithetical to what seems to me to be the natural impulse to write a story that amazes.

Surely, then, the ultimate judge of what is acceptable is the reader? And an awful lot of readers care an awful lot about quality - sometimes in surprisingly different ways. Sometimes the bare minimum takes a lot of hard work - the writer's equivalent of Occam's razor. I think those who have achieved a bare minimum through conscious care and decision are easily distinguished from those who have tried to get away with doing as little as possible. I'm pretty sure readers, consciously or unconsciously, can tell if you've applied your CMS rules strictly in the hope that that is the only oversight your work needs, as much as they can tell if you've studiously avoided applying any rules as an anarchistic gesture. And I think that even those readers who thoroughly disapprove of the latter will agree that it is easier to read than the former.

[Harry Dewulf]

Michelle, I'd say you are atypical of most readers.

I did mention my fondness for Venn diagrams. Part of me can't resist saying: 'no criteria defined for subset "most"'. Readers are articulate in direct proportion to how much they read. All readers have enough critical sense to say "I liked it", "I didn't like it". Those who read more than one book a year can probably say why. They might not use editor's jargon to say it, but I doubt the writer would fail to understand.

[MichelleR]

The more I think of "atypical of most readers," the more it bothers me. This is a board of smart readers. There is a Twitterverse of engaged readers. A -- name your preferred social media or message board -- of passionate readers. There are a lot of people who might not use the label "reviewer," but still like to review on Amazon, or Goodreads, or Shelfari, or any number of places. Perhaps these people are all atypical readers, but there are still enough of them to make or break a career, and if atypical is "cares about quality, discusses books publicly," I think that's the wrong fringe group to write off because these are the exact people you're counting on to tell people all about your book.

Here is where I get sentimental. There is such a beauty to me in people of all education levels and levels of sophistication reading and taking refuge in the act of reading. That's sacred to me. That needs to be sacred to the writer, too. They are your guest and you are theirs. You invite them into your book, they invite you into their lives. You don't give them second best, not if you can help it. And you don't do so by implying they don't know any better or can make due with less.

[Harry Dewulf]

The more I think of "atypical of most readers," the more it bothers me. This is a board of smart readers. There is a Twitterverse of engaged readers. A -- name your preferred social media or message board -- of passionate readers. There are a lot of people who might not use the label "reviewer," but still like to review on Amazon, or Goodreads, or Shelfari, or any number of places. Perhaps these people are all atypical readers, but there are still enough of them to make or break a career, and if atypical is "cares about quality, discusses books publicly," I think that's the wrong fringe group to write off because these are the exact people you're counting on to tell people all about your book.

Here is where I get sentimental. There is such a beauty to me in people of all education levels and levels of sophistication reading and taking refuge in the act of reading. That's sacred to me. That needs to be sacred to the writer, too. They are your guest and you are theirs. You invite them into your book, they invite you into their lives. You don't give them second best, not if you can help it. And you don't do so by implying they don't know any better or can make do with less.

once again in want of a *like* button

[CraigInTwinCities]

I'm willing to bet you could take John Locke's books and put them before an editor and they'd come back with lots of red ink on them. Likewise I know Amanda Hocking complained about hiring editors and having her books go out with errors in them anyway, and them selling hundreds of thousands of copies regardless.

Asher,

As someone who's read most of both those writers' stuff, here are my thoughts.

1) Amanda: Does well at a number of things. Spelling, formatting, etc.? Not among them. The sort of writer who definitely needs the aid that professional editors can give her. The storytelling's good, the marketing's savvy, but we all have weak points and the proofing/editing/formatting bits were hers. Now she's with a trad-pub who can protect her properly from editors who hang out a shingle but don't have the experience level she needs them to have. (At least a couple of her earliest editors were other indies who had some of their own editorial weaknesses and were not editing specialists. They did the best they could for her, to be sure, but their best wasn't enough to get her to where she needed to be.)

2) Locke: I'm close to the end of the Creed novels and haven't started his westerns yet. But I can tell you that Telemachus Press does its job for him, and his prose stands toe-to-toe with any well-edited trad-pubbed author. Tends toward some writerly sins like passive voice, but there's very little in the way of typos, bad formatting, and the like. A much better writer than most people give him credit for being.

And sometimes good books don't sell and poor ones sell like gangbusters. There is no accounting for it in any logical way.

Which isn't any different from dealing with trad-pubbed books. James Patterson's quality varies greatly but any book with his name on it sells. Just one illustration in agreement with you.

[CraigInTwinCities]

...an example of editing that probably makes little difference in terms of sales. Readers read through that stuff. They don't really care....

I think you'd be safer saying, "Some readers are willing to forgive that." But the truth is, especially these days, sloppiness of presentation will lead to 1-star reviews and a negative vibe, regardless of sales.

So some readers obviously do care.

[CraigInTwinCities]

My experience in editing, whether fiction or marketing copy or software user manuals, has been that those people who have done a lot of reading, reading of good books, need very little editing of their style, and the more those people write, the less editing they need of their style. Could it be that they are already, consciously or unconsciously, applying style rules that they have learned from reading. The very rules than CMS infers and codifies?

Generally, you're right. When you're dealing with a combination of talent and experience.

However, here's what I'm looking at a bit down the road:

People like me grew up reading nothing but trad-pubbed stuff because that's all there was. The CMS ruled the style of those books in terms of presentation because of a few generations of editors trained in its precepts.

So the "great books" I read... and I read a TON growing up; in fact, I probably read more books by the age of 18 than the average Joe reads in his entire life...

...but anyway, the great books communicated the right models of fiction presentation to me, because they followed (mostly) the same set of guidelines.

Which is great for me and my generation of writer.

But now? What about the future/young writers growing up today? The folks who read Amanda's early, pre-trad-pubbed stuff, or any number of other indie books out there who bypass (often for understandable financial reasons) solid editing?

There's a bunch of fans who will become writers themselves one day, but the writers who are part of their main literary diet are not as well-edited as the books that nourished my mind growing up.

So you'll get a whole generation of writers who don't know just how much they don't know.

Who think "Yeh" is the correct spelling of "Yeah," and that "Yeah" is appropriate when what they really mean in context is "Yay!"

Or who think punctuation goes OUTSIDE of quotation marks, "Just like their favorite indies did it", he said.

Don't get me wrong: I love the indie movement. I've come to treasure the work of a number of indie writers. (Some, even, despite their weaknesses.)

But I think the water gets muddied enough by generally low educational standards.

Then you add in poorly-edited (and unedited) writers, poorly trained editors, and all those books influencing another generation? I hate to use the phrase "slippery slope," but it might be applicable here.

So, those are some of the concerns. And they only go up when someone goes off on a philisophical "we don't need standards or rules" rant.

As I'm sure you know: most of the really great writers who break some rules for a specific desired effect, do so only once they know the basics to begin with.

Another source of the concern is dealing in a side-job/contract work with writers who have paid for editing, but get back something that's still a train wreck. While the ultimate responsibility may fall on the writer, isn't there a responsibility of an editor to either do the job right... or if the client hasn't paid for that level of editing, to at least point out to said writer, "There's more problems here and you need a deeper edit."

(Granted, most editors WOULD do this. But you'd be surprised how many do not.)

[CraigInTwinCities]

Side-note:

Speaking of "bad models," I also worry about writers who grow up reading today's comic books as kids.

When I grew up, for example, Marvel Comics was run by a comics-storytelling-literate Stan Lee, and a very VERY storytelling-literate Jim Shooter.

Shooter was hated by a lot of comic books creative types... but the reason for it was always based around his passion for telling literate stories, even in the comic book form.

By comparison, today's comic books are merely a collection of scenes. Pick up and single issue, and rarely do you get even a complete story; you get a fragment of a six-issue arc, perhaps, destined for a trade paperback release... and even then, comics today are mostly fanboy stories; tales told by the sort of folks who can tell you what Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson fought about in Amazing Spider-Man #121, but can't cite Twain's rules of storytelling, and have probably never heard of it.

So even in trade paperback form, the stories being told today, even by the "top" writers in the industry, require you to be at least a 45-year-old lifelong fanboy, but which are so insular, poorly presented in the panels, and self-referential that few "outsiders" looking in would be able to tell you who most of the characters are and what makes them tick after reading a single issue. And at $3-$4 a crack, who has patience for that kind of incompetence?

Well, apparently a LOT of young people who are now coming into the age where they want to be writers and are writing indie novels. And they come into boards like this and say, "I'm used to stories that span 150 inter-connected issues, so if my first book doesn't make sense yet, just stick with me... by Book 10, it'll all become clear." (And rarely does, even then.)

Which is an illustration simply to underline my point that when we start letting go of standards, the wrong messages get passed on to the next generation of writers, and their mistakes are even worse than ours...

[Decon]

Or who think punctuation goes OUTSIDE of quotation marks, "Just like their favorite indies did it", he said.

Don't get me wrong: I love the indie movement. I've come to treasure the work of a number of indie writers. (Some, even, despite their weaknesses.)

But I think the water gets muddied enough by generally low educational standards.

I think the water is even more muddied by the very medium of eBooks transending the traditional territorial boundaries, to add to the confusion of differing style guides used in the same, or different countries. Whilst music transends boundaries, literature styles does not. I personally think it is time to come up with an international standard similar to the one just agreed between Portugal and Brazil. At Least we would all be working from the same song sheet.

If we are to worry about educational standards, then should trad ebook and indie publishers not think twice before ticking that rights territory that is adding to our children's' confusion over what is right or wrong in relation to what they are taught at school.

British

The words on the magazine’s cover, ‘The link between coffee and
cholesterol’, caught his eye.
‘You’re eating too much,’ she told him. ‘You’ll soon look like your
father.’
‘Have you seen this article, “The link between coffee and
cholesterol”?’ he asked.
‘It was as if’, he explained, ‘I had swallowed a toad, and it kept
croaking “ribbut, ribbut”, from deep in my belly.’
She particularly enjoyed the article ‘Looking for the “New
Man”’.

American

The words on the magazine’s cover, “The link between coffee and
cholesterol,” caught his eye.
“You’re eating too much,” she told him. “You’ll soon look like
your father.”
“Have you seen this article, ‘The link between coffee and
cholesterol’?” he asked.
“It was as if,” he explained, “I had swallowed a toad, and it kept
croaking ‘ribbut, ribbut,’ from deep in my stomach.”
She particularly enjoyed the article “Looking for the ‘New Man.’”

[Harry Dewulf]

Which is an illustration simply to underline my point that when we start letting go of standards, the wrong messages get passed on to the next generation of writers, and their mistakes are even worse than ours...

To what extent is that a variation on: "Every generation thinks that standards are getting lower but ours is the first where that's really true." ?

(Please note my British punctuation Mojo working there.)

So much gets published now that even the most rabid readers can't be reading extracts from everything with a catchy title to decide what to read. They have to rely on the noisy minority who review. An articulate review that praises will encourage me to read the book. A review that reads:

"I like totally luvved this it wuz ossum like Twiglet but y'no even better?" will pretty much convince me not to go there no matter how many stars there are. I think that readers will continue to set the standard, which is why we have to listen to T.L. , W.H. and even you. 

aside I am really appreciating this discussion. I'm sure it will improve my editing. This is why we need to talk more about editing.

[CraigInTwinCities]

Personal Annoyance:

I know interior quotes are a common format, but personally I prefer the acceptable, though less common, rule on it: italics.

So, for example:

"I went to see 'Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows' last night," he said. "Harry Dewulf called it, 'a tour de force for Robert Downey Jr.', so that was all I needed to hear. You know how much I liked him in those superhero movies, 'Iron Man' and 'Iron Man 2'."

Though correct, the period outside of the interior comma ('Iron Man 2',") still rankles me. This is what I prefer:

"I went to see Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows last night," he said. "Harry Dewulf called it, a tour de force for Robert Downey Jr., so that was all I needed to hear. You know how much I liked him in those superhero movies, Iron Man and Iron Man 2."

Ahh... so much cleaner.

[Harry Dewulf]

Personal Annoyance:

I know interior quotes are a common format, but personally I prefer the acceptable, though less common, rule on it: italics.

So, for example:

"I went to see 'Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows' last night," he said. "Harry Dewulf called it, 'a tour de force for Robert Downey Jr.', so that was all I needed to hear. You know how much I liked him in those superhero movies, 'Iron Man' and 'Iron Man 2'."

Though correct, the period outside of the interior comma ('Iron Man 2',") still rankles me. This is what I prefer:

"I went to see Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows last night," he said. "Harry Dewulf called it, a tour de force for Robert Downey Jr., so that was all I needed to hear. You know how much I liked him in those superhero movies, Iron Man and Iron Man 2."

Ahh... so much cleaner.

Actually I did like him in Iron Man, though I didn't like the film at all. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows however, which I did indeed go to see last night - dubbed into French - really was great fun, though I couldn't say a tour de force with a straight face. Actually I said Robert Downey Jr. was "a treat". In much the same way that Doug McClure or admittedly, Treat Williams, can be a treat. Thinking about it, I could say a tour de force with a convincing French accent, which is the next best thing.

[T.L. Haddix]

My head hurts. Glad to see this thread still going, though.

[Terrence OBrien]

"But now? What about the future/young writers growing up today? The folks who read Amanda's early, pre-trad-pubbed stuff, or any number of other indie books out there who bypass (often for understandable financial reasons) solid editing?

There's a bunch of fans who will become writers themselves one day, but the writers who are part of their main literary diet are not as well-edited as the books that nourished my mind growing up.

So you'll get a whole generation of writers who don't know just how much they don't know.

Who think "Yeh" is the correct spelling of "Yeah," and that "Yeah" is appropriate when what they really mean in context is "Yay!"

Or who think punctuation goes OUTSIDE of quotation marks, "Just like their favorite indies did it", he said."

That's how the language will evolve. Nobody will care. It will be seen as natural. Some might even remark that they saw an old book with a comma inside the quotes and were so jarred they couldn't finish it.

[Asher MacDonald]

I think you'd be safer saying, "Some readers are willing to forgive that." But the truth is, especially these days, sloppiness of presentation will lead to 1-star reviews and a negative vibe, regardless of sales.

So some readers obviously do care.

I think "sloppiness" does get noticed, but I'd define that as typos, poor punctuation, and missing words. "He went [to] the store."

Most readers are not going to consider a long sentence that would be better if it were two sentences as a bit of sloppy writing. Most readers are not going to read a sentence, pause, and think, "This sentence would read better with a comma inserted."

It's this kind of editing that I think will make very little difference in sales or even reader enjoyment. This is not something I've always believed. I have a background in poetry, of all things, so I'm used to editing at the most minute level where every word choice carries a lot of weight, but I've come to realize that genre fiction is a different ballgame.

If you ever get a chance, get a copy of one of the old pulp magazines from the 30's or 40's. I've read a few. The writing, for the most part, is awful. No one cared. They sold like crazy.

[T.L. Haddix]

Asher, I disagree with most of what you're saying about how readers won't care if a book is in need of editing or not, as long as the mistakes aren't glaringly obvious - paraphrasing here, but that's essentially your point.

I think some genres are more forgiving than others, but I also think that if a book isn't put together well, there will be that indefinable "something" missing, and most readers will pick up on that. They may not be able to tell us writers in the exact words of an editor why they didn't love a book, why it was just an "okay" book, but they'll know a decent book from a good book from an excellent book.  Much like people who are not artists can look at a painting, drawing, sculpture and say "It's pretty but it doesn't really do it for me." They can't tell you that the balance and proportion of the figures in the work are wrong, or the perspective is off. They just know something isn't right.

Is this true for every book in every genre? Absolutely not. But I think it's a good rule of thumb. And like someone said (Michelle, maybe?), downplaying the intelligence of readers is never smart. Just because someone cannot articulate a problem, that doesn't mean they don't recognize when there is one.

[Terrence OBrien]

'Just because someone cannot articulate a problem, that doesn't mean they don't recognize when there is one.'

It's also possible they can't articulate a problem because they don't recognize a problem. Tastes and preferences vary, and I doubt many readers care if their tastes and preferences agree with those of various writers and editors. They vote with their wallets.

[MichelleR]

'Just because someone cannot articulate a problem, that doesn't mean they don't recognize when there is one.'

It's also possible they can't articulate a problem because they don't recognize a problem. Tastes and preferences vary, and I doubt many readers care if their tastes and preferences agree with those of various writers and editors. They vote with their wallets.

Of course. No one is saying that there aren't very forgiving readers, ones who will be unaware of the problems, or ones who love it anyhow -- T.L. wasn't talking about that. She was talking about how a reader can be dissatisfied, but they have neither the tools nor the interest in breaking down why. You won't hear from them, but they will never buy another book from you.

When you aim for quality, you please both the people who would have liked a lesser effort and those who expect quality. If most readers like your book just a little more because of it being more polished, your reviews bump up, your fans increase, your word of mouth is better, when your prices go up more people will deem you worth it. The sun will shine, the birds will sing, the ants will go bother another picnic.

[Harry Dewulf]

That's how the language will evolve. Nobody will care. It will be seen as natural. Some might even remark that they saw an old book with a comma inside the quotes and were so jarred they couldn't finish it.

That's how it has always been. And visibly, many people do care. In addition there are some who don't like stuff but can't really say why, and there are some who like stuff regardless of how standards compliant it is or is not. Does that mean that writers and editors should not try to ensure that a good story can be appreciated by as many people as possible? And is attempting to apply standards not a strategy to use in this? When I have a client who has a good story to tell, I want that story to reach, and please, as many people as it can reach, and can please. I will use any means at my disposal to achieve this. So I pay close attention to how other writers (and presumably, their editors) are, for better or worse, changing language both orally and written, insofar as one person has any possibility at all of doing that. And when in doubt or uncertainty, like many of those people who do care about how language changes, I refer to authoritative texts like CMS.

That doesn't mean that I can or should keep language from changing. But historically, stories have always outlasted books, because stories evolve with language and culture. Of the books I'm editing today, I doubt that many will survive the centuries to come. But most of them are not telling new stories. They deal with the same archetypes of being human that you get in Shakespeare, Maupassant or George Lucas. There may be some innovation in themes and details; there may be some innovation in narrative technique, and yes, the language, both verbal and cultural that today's writers use is much changed from the language of Dafoe or Swift. But the conundrum of how to be what we are is the same one, and that is what stories are about; our stories teach us to be human.

I think I'm starting to see a conclusion here, and I'm glad to say I don't feel like I've come full circle. I think I've gone out into the wilderness seeking truth and found that others have already passed the same way. Some of them left faint tracks, others scarred the landscape, but some got together and tried to build a road. It's a road that has to be re-travelled often, not to keep it from being lost, but to keep it fresh, to keep it all connected, to ensure the way is kept open.

I don't think you have to stay on the road, but it is a whole lot easier to cross the wilderness just knowing the road is there.

[Terrence OBrien]

"Does that mean that writers and editors should not try to ensure that a good story can be appreciated by as many people as possible?"

I don't know. I leave that to the writer.

[MichelleR]

"Does that mean that writers and editors should not try to ensure that a good story can be appreciated by as many people as possible?"

I don't know. I leave that to the writer.

I don't think anyone doubts the final product is up to the writer.