As a former copy editor, I couldn't agree more. I was always very, very careful not to let my personal grammatical prejudices get in the way of the story. Or at least I made a concerted effort!

I have a dear friend whose first book came back essentially rewritten by the copy editor. She's still talking to the publisher about that...

(Reply) (Thread)

I was very lucky with my first books, and since have had a wide range from the worst ever to the VERY good.

Do you have any words of wisdom for writers? I would think that CEs might resent being told how to do their job the same way we do. What do you think?

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

Words of wisdom? Stand up for your voice. I read a lot of genre fiction, and even then I probably over-copyedited from time to time.

When my friend's copyeditor chnaged her entire book from active to passive tense, she very quickly fired off an email both the the CE and her editor, letting them know it was Not Acceptable. I'd treat it like any other business service; if they aren't doing their job correctly, let them and their boss/your editor know.

IMNSHO, copy editors are there to 1) fix misspellings (real ones), 2) watch out for weird continuity errors (Dear Author: you killed this guy off last chapter....) 3) fix horribly bad grammar errors (real ones) and 4) be the Consistency Devil when it comes to creative spellings. Also to watch out for weird formatting/layout issues, depending on how small of a press you're talking about. :-)

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

Personally - and this is talking with my copy editor's hat on - I think you're doing the copy editor a favour if you're saying 'this is a work of fiction. The quality of a work of fiction is not measured by its close adherence to a style manual, and writers of fiction often make word choices according to concerns that a non-writer might never take into consideration.

I also think that whoever employs the copy editor needs to know when a copy editor breaks the first rule of copy editing ("It's not my book," sometimes said through clenched teeth) and creates major problems for the writer.

As I see it, the job of a fiction copy editor is to a) catch outright mistakes, b) spot inconsistencies (continuity checking), and c) improve the flow of the text without interfering. The CE does not have to like it. The intended audience needs to like and understand it, and I find it always helps to pick up a couple of competing works to check what I'm aiming for. I've copy edited one particularly awkwardly written mss; but everybody else in the field was using the same convoluted and highly rhethorical language... so I ground my teeth and left it as it was.

Not. My. Book.

By the time a CE gets their hand on a manuscript, it has already been edited. If the editor is OK with word choices, sentence length, flowery, complex, or otherwise non-standard language, _then the copy editor needs to be OK with it, too_ unless the language really stands between the reader and his understanding of the text. Even so, if the whole book is written like that, chances are that its intended audience is OK with that *and that everybody involved - writer, editor, readers - will get very pissed off if a copy editor meddles.

The wonderful thing about electronic copy editing is that you can eat crow in private and with no-one the wiser. If, as a CE, you have charged in and changed things that ought to have been left alone, you can take them out again, and nobody will ever know that you changed dwarfs to dwarves or destroyed one of the author's clues that a character knows more than they ought to know.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

My writing mentor is a fantasy writer with another book in the pipeline, and has been regaling us with the same issues the last few weeks. I smile and nod and think what a wonderful thing it will be when I've finally gotten to the place where I have a copy editor to be crabby about. :)

(Reply) (Thread)

You're absolutely right. Life on this side of the not-yet-published/published divide is definitely better, even with the worst copy edit ever. Screaming and moaning and stamping of feet and gnashing of teeth aside...it's worth it. It's all worth it. I wish you ever success and hope that someday you get the emails or letters that make it clear your book touched someone deeply. Those are humbling and rewarding both.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

I have! And they are. At this stage in the game, my "alpha readers" are more for encouragement than critiquing, and they're very good at their jobs.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

Part of what I do for a friend of mine who writes is to do light copyediting before it gets sent off. I apparently have an automatic error highlighter in my brain, since spelling errors and letter reversals leap off the screen at me as if highlighted in neon. (I've always had it; I was working on my mother's Masters in Education at ten because she cannot spell.) Also read and see where she needs to add details, catch things like "The sex was hot, but you have him taking off his socks twice", and generally be supportive when the plot and characters aren't speaking to each other that day. It's fun.

(Reply) (Thread)

I have the same sort of thing. I even know why -- it's because I read quickly and treat phrases (sometimes sentences or even paragraphs) as a unit, so anything out of the ordinary jumps out and causes me to stop and reread it slowly. Lexical (spelling, reversed or missing letters, words runtogether or with odd spacing), grammatical, and semantic (things like ambiguous pronouns fpr instance), all cause a 'glitch' in my reading.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work as well for anything I write, if I read it soon after I wrote it, because when I'm reading it I auto-correct it to what I know I meant and don't see the errors. When I see my comments of posts coming back after a few hours I cringe (I fully expect to do so with this comment; it's an Internet law that any comments on errors themselves contain errors)...

The thing I don't know, however, is what level the author wants me to read. Do they actually want me to pick up every jot and tittle, do they want comments on their syntax or continuity, or do they just want to know whether I like the story enough that it's worth them continuing? Frequently the author doesn't know either, until they see my comments and realise that it wasn't the one they wanted.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

This appears to be something that can run in families - three out of four people in my immediate family have a brain that does this, and I'm not sure about the fourth (having not seen evidence one way or the other).

It's when you read a sentence and you have to tell the writer that you're sure that there's a reason the sentence is structured the way it is, but you can't actually tell whether the sentence means one particular thing or its exact opposite. THAT is the bit that amuses me the most :)

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

This reminded me of a quote from Neil Gaiman on writing:

"Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong."

I've caught myself making that mistake when reading for my friend Beth -- her voice is not my voice, and I have to remind myself of that so I can just make those little marginal notes like "awkward". It doesn't pay to annoy someone who will be reading my work in return!

I can imagine how aggravating a bad copy editor is. I can't wait until I get one of my own. ;)

Edited at 2010-05-12 01:51 am (UTC)

(Reply) (Thread)

One reason I don't critique often is that I find it extremely difficult to overcome my own voice and my own plot daemon. In some circumstances, I can limit myself to surface stuff...but mostly it's such a struggle that I'm ineffective-to-harmful. With strong-voiced professionals (a few people) it's less a problem--they aren't malleable and I'm respectful--but with the timid or wishy-washy, I'm a disaster. Much safer to back away and let someone else do it (and I'm in awe, sometimes, listening to those who are good at it, at conventions.)

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

Really good editors have a talent just as worthy of admiration as really good writers, in my opinion. That's a hard line to walk, between correcting the faults and preserving the original vision and voice. Kudos to the good ones for bringing out the best in us.

Really bad ones ... well, enjoy those copy edits. ;)

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

I have had excellent editors (distinct from copy editors) all along--amazing luck, IMO. And yes, that's a very, very important talent and skillset. By a wonderful twist of fate, my current editor, Betsy Mitchell, was my first book editor...so she and I came back together in the same fictional world where we met. She absolutely saved my bacon with the huge, sprawling monster of the first three books, and everything she's asked for in revisions of the new ones has made perfect sense to me.

With the others--also excellent--there've been some adjustments to make, because they're all talented individuals with very individual minds--and we hadn't done three books together before--but I respect them all and am grateful for their help. (And no, this is not boot-licking. I know better than any of my readers exactly what each one did and why it improved the books. Yes, some were easier to click with than others, but I've been incredibly lucky.)

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

When my partner & I were editing Ravens in the Library we went through EIGHT passes... and that doesn't count the workshopping we (mostly he) did with individual authors.

We caught errors on every single damned pass. Including some in stories that had previously been published by top editors in the business. Most were formatting issues with things like punctuation, spacing, and English spelling as opposed to American (every single story arrived in a different format) but some were definite content issues. Apples aren't ripe in the spring, any house with a two year old is going to have breakables well above reach, and no self-respecting witch would hang her herbs to dry over the oven--they'd lose all their potency!

A good copy editor is worth their weight in gold. Far too many publishing houses have turned the editing role over to spellcheck, and the authors are the ones who end up hearing about it from annoyed fans. "Squeaking" the mundanes, indeed!

(Reply) (Thread)

Oh, now that is priceless....I'm suddenly seeing a row of "mundanes" like little Kewpie dolls with squeakers inside, all dressed preppy-like...

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

Copyedit is one of those things I consider maybe wanting to do with myself; I actually enjoy editing and helping people with their writing on my roleplay and fiction sites. This is a good post to read as I consider what else I may want to do with this English degree I'm working on!

I can't wait for the next book, I devoured Oath of Fealty in a day!

(Reply) (Thread)

On the other hand, if the writer catches the mistake the copy editor didn't, and finds some new tweaks to make, then the writer gets a tiny burst of glee.

And finding an error that the copyeditor shouldn't by all rights have been expected to find gives this copyeditor that same burst of glee. Once I was editing a book where there were some Hebrew words, and the author used the masculine version of the plural for one of them instead of the feminine, and if I hadn't had Hebrew as my language in school, it would have gone right past.

(Reply) (Thread)

Wow! I'm SO impressed. You definitely deserve to feel gleeful about that one.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)