![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Mar. 8th, 2011 02:32 pmWriting
So, after several gremlin-riddled attempts, I finally got the copyedits for The Shard Axe off to my new editor. One step closer to release - woohoo!
During the whole ridiculously long process (due largely, I believe, to either Yahoo being the tool of the devil or an overzealous profanity filter, or maybe both), I started thinking about copyeditors.
(OBLIGATORY CYA DISCLAIMER: the following has nothing to do with any of MY copyeditors, current or past; it is a work of rhetoric only, and any resemblances to any of my copyeditors, current or past, are sheer coincidence, and anyone who says otherwise is a damned liar. So there.)
Writers almost universally hate copyeditors. Why is that? Surely, not all copyeditors are evil villains laughing maniacally while they torture and violate the precious prose of unsuspecting authors. There must be good copyeditors out there, if only because the law of large numbers (as opposed to the law of averages, which is really just wishful thinking) tells us so. But they seem to be like the proverbial "good man" - if they do, in fact, exist, they are either already taken or of a different persuasion.
I think this is because, when you have good copyeditors, you don't notice them. They unobtrusively fix typos, correct grammar and punctuation, tighten sentences, etc. In short, they make the story better without actually changing it.
A bad copyeditor, on the other hand...whew. Where do I start? Many writers secretly believe that copyeditors are writers who couldn't hack it themselves and so are trying to live vicariously through/steal some reflected glory from the authors whose works they edit. Now, of course, this is patently untrue for the vast majority of copyeditors. But, as with so many things, we seldom hear about the vast majority who do their jobs professionally and competently every day, who are neither bad nor drawn that way. No, instead we hear about the Jack the Rippers of prose that gut the stories of hapless writers, pulling out sentences like glistening intestines and rearranging them in grotesque ways before placing them back haphazardly inside the cooling narrative corpse.
Take, for instance, Piers Anthony. Many years ago, he wrote a largely forgettable book called But What of Earth? A book which would no doubt have faded from consciousness and the racial memory of writers were it not for the fact that it included both the original story as written by the author and the badly copyedited version that made it to print. This book made flesh and immortalized for all time the deepest fear of every writer - that some ignorant hack was going to come along and ruin their story sometime in between acceptance and publication, and what the world at large read would only resemble their original work of art in that both used words, and sometimes, punctuation. The story would no longer be their story, but it would still bear their name.
Think about it for a moment. When writers read a book, and we notice that the main character's eye color has changed three times in the last chapter or that one homonym has been replaced with another with no regard for actual meaning, we say, "Wow, this copyeditor sucks."
When a reader encounters the same thing, he says, "Wow, this writer sucks." And, maybe, he writes scathing reviews on Amazon, blogs about how bad the book is, and tells all his friends to stay as far away from that writer's work as it is possible to get without the benefit of interstellar travel.
And that, I think, is the real reason most writers hate bad copyeditors. Because, by and large, their mistakes are attributed to US. And since the number one rule of responding to reviews that might bash us for what are not actually our mistakes is "DON'T," then we never get to tell our side of the story. We are labeled "lazy" or "incompetent" or "too stupid to live" and we lose readers and sales and contracts while the true culprits go merrily along, padding their resumes with the mangled corpses of our books.
Of course, none of this applies to The Shard Axe, which has had amazing editorial support on all conceivable levels. We should all be so lucky with all our books.
But, in the meantime, a writer's best friend, aside from her thesaurus and her earplugs? Galleys. Heh.
Everything Else
What, you want more? What do you think this is, Fat Tuesday or something? Heh.
So, after several gremlin-riddled attempts, I finally got the copyedits for The Shard Axe off to my new editor. One step closer to release - woohoo!
During the whole ridiculously long process (due largely, I believe, to either Yahoo being the tool of the devil or an overzealous profanity filter, or maybe both), I started thinking about copyeditors.
(OBLIGATORY CYA DISCLAIMER: the following has nothing to do with any of MY copyeditors, current or past; it is a work of rhetoric only, and any resemblances to any of my copyeditors, current or past, are sheer coincidence, and anyone who says otherwise is a damned liar. So there.)
Writers almost universally hate copyeditors. Why is that? Surely, not all copyeditors are evil villains laughing maniacally while they torture and violate the precious prose of unsuspecting authors. There must be good copyeditors out there, if only because the law of large numbers (as opposed to the law of averages, which is really just wishful thinking) tells us so. But they seem to be like the proverbial "good man" - if they do, in fact, exist, they are either already taken or of a different persuasion.
I think this is because, when you have good copyeditors, you don't notice them. They unobtrusively fix typos, correct grammar and punctuation, tighten sentences, etc. In short, they make the story better without actually changing it.
A bad copyeditor, on the other hand...whew. Where do I start? Many writers secretly believe that copyeditors are writers who couldn't hack it themselves and so are trying to live vicariously through/steal some reflected glory from the authors whose works they edit. Now, of course, this is patently untrue for the vast majority of copyeditors. But, as with so many things, we seldom hear about the vast majority who do their jobs professionally and competently every day, who are neither bad nor drawn that way. No, instead we hear about the Jack the Rippers of prose that gut the stories of hapless writers, pulling out sentences like glistening intestines and rearranging them in grotesque ways before placing them back haphazardly inside the cooling narrative corpse.
Take, for instance, Piers Anthony. Many years ago, he wrote a largely forgettable book called But What of Earth? A book which would no doubt have faded from consciousness and the racial memory of writers were it not for the fact that it included both the original story as written by the author and the badly copyedited version that made it to print. This book made flesh and immortalized for all time the deepest fear of every writer - that some ignorant hack was going to come along and ruin their story sometime in between acceptance and publication, and what the world at large read would only resemble their original work of art in that both used words, and sometimes, punctuation. The story would no longer be their story, but it would still bear their name.
Think about it for a moment. When writers read a book, and we notice that the main character's eye color has changed three times in the last chapter or that one homonym has been replaced with another with no regard for actual meaning, we say, "Wow, this copyeditor sucks."
When a reader encounters the same thing, he says, "Wow, this writer sucks." And, maybe, he writes scathing reviews on Amazon, blogs about how bad the book is, and tells all his friends to stay as far away from that writer's work as it is possible to get without the benefit of interstellar travel.
And that, I think, is the real reason most writers hate bad copyeditors. Because, by and large, their mistakes are attributed to US. And since the number one rule of responding to reviews that might bash us for what are not actually our mistakes is "DON'T," then we never get to tell our side of the story. We are labeled "lazy" or "incompetent" or "too stupid to live" and we lose readers and sales and contracts while the true culprits go merrily along, padding their resumes with the mangled corpses of our books.
Of course, none of this applies to The Shard Axe, which has had amazing editorial support on all conceivable levels. We should all be so lucky with all our books.
But, in the meantime, a writer's best friend, aside from her thesaurus and her earplugs? Galleys. Heh.
Everything Else
What, you want more? What do you think this is, Fat Tuesday or something? Heh.
