#on editing

[tarysande]

After I called myself her book’s midwife, a client told me I was, in fact, the Goddess of Birthing Books. Henceforth, I may be petitioned via sacrifices of your darlings and offerings of fountain pen ink, notebooks purchased with the intention but not the reality of being written in, and cold hard cash.

[michelle-ma-cherie]

i'm on vacation now and barely did anything with my wips despite having enough free time😭

i guess moral of the story is i need pressure from my work so i could procrastinate by doing fun stuff

[mumblingsage]

Remedy 1: Start at the End

If you start assessing the novel at the end you can see if the scenes all point in the direction you want them to. Or if there are bits missing, or parts that are too flabby.

Visual artists often do a similar thing. If they're drawing an object they're familiar with, they draw it upside down. [...] The purpose is the same--to see the detail and the shape afresh.

This is what happens if you assess the book as an end point and assemble it backwards. Suddenly you will see where you need to write more, and what is clogging the story up.

-Roz Morris, Nail Your Novel

[etrangersvoyageant]

You need a certain head on your shoulders to edit a novel, and it’s not the head of a writer in the thick of it, nor the head of a professional editor who’s read it in twelve different versions. It’s the head of a smart stranger who picks it off a bookshelf and begins to read. You need to get the head of that smart stranger somehow. You need to forget you ever wrote that book.” ― Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays by Zadie Smith

[the-furbylicious]

This advice is especially important for screenwriters, as we should only write what can be explicitly seen and heard in the film. If I do ever start writing prose, I'm sure I will come back to this post. Explaining why a character knows or feels something will always be so much stronger than just saying they do.

So... I found this and now it keeps coming to mind. You hear about "life-changing writing advice" all the time and usually its really not—but honestly this is it man.

I'm going to try it.

[lieutenant-sarcastic]

Fuck moon’s taking poison damage

[lennyjamin]

spoke deeply to me.

[teaboot]

what annoys me about explaining evolution to people who don’t think it’s real is that everyone’s idea of how it works seems to be from this

Whereas the reality is far more like

[songsofwaterandnight]

No, app on my phone, I don't want to edit it with AI. I don't want to generate with AI. I don't want to ask the AI. I don't want to make AI wallpapers. I don't want to rewrite with AI. I don't want t-

[coolerhope]

funniest fucking thing

[tarysande]

Hi! I’m considering becoming an editor but I’m not sure if it’s the right fit for me. If you don’t mind answering, what was your path like for becoming an editor, and what does the job mostly consist of for you?

Additionally, while I really do like helping other people’s work become better, I get too in my head to release a lot of my own work. Does editing require you to also be a writer most of the time, or could I get by mostly just editing?

Thanks!

Hi, anonymous friend!

These are really good questions for a potential editor to ask.

To (sort-of) answer your question, the amount of writing involved depends on the type of editing, honestly. So, first you have to decide what kind of editor you want to be.

Roughly, editing breaks down into three-to-four types: developmental/substantive, line/stylistic, copy editing, and proofreading. These terms are mixed up and interchanged ... often. Increasingly, line editing includes or incorporates copy editing, which is why I say "three-to-four."

Developmental is the big picture stuff, including manuscript critiques. Books of all kinds usually undergo some kind of developmental editing--by editorial agents, acquisitions editors, freelance developmental editors, etc. In my experience, this is also the kind of editing that requires the most writing and/or the most author/editor interaction.

Stylistic/line editing tends to be editing at the sentence level, looking at diction, structure, clarity, consistency, etc. Copy editing, on the other hand, is what many people think of when they think of editing--it's the mechanics of writing, like spelling, grammar, punctuation.

Proofreading is the rather specialized skill of editing proofs. They're the final eyes on a pre-published piece; they're looking for typos and errors rather than anything that will involve significant authorial changes because a proof page has already been "set" (as it were).

All of these kinds of editing can be applied to many different areas of communication, and the editors who perform them can be self-employed (like me) or work for an employer (i.e., as a more traditional employee). Employee editors might work in-house at a publisher (of books, magazines, academic journals, etc.), or they might have any number of editing-focused roles in business, government, education, etc. Self-employed editors may also end up working as contractors for other companies; this is pretty normal.

Many book publishers, including the Big Five, farm out a lot of their editing these days, by the way. Especially the copy editing and proofreading. So, those particular jobs are dwindling as in-house options. Publishers can pay freelancers less ... and avoid paying benefits. (#capitalism)

I will also say that, especially in jobs with anything to do with marketing or advertising, there's a lot of annoying scope creep where "copy editor" is often expected to be a copy writer, too. Again, it's a symptom of employers wanting to pay fewer people to do more jobs (and it's really annoying).

My path has mostly involved trying as many things as possible and slowly weeding out the ones I don't like. I've pretty much always been self-employed because the personal benefits (setting my own schedule, rates, deadlines) works better for me. That said, I'm Canadian (so I don't have to worry about employer-covered healthcare), and I have a partner whose salary is regular and whose benefits cover me, so I don't have some of the worries a freelancer in the US or a single-income household might have. I'm increasingly working on the development side of things because big-picture storytelling, including writing and editor/author interaction, is my jam. But I have also done a ton of line/copy editing on fiction, non-fiction, academic work, etc.

Without knowing what kind of editing you're looking to get into, it's harder for me to offer suggestions for next steps, but generally, I'd say it's important to get SOME training--whether through a school, a certificate program, or the various workshops and professional development offered by editing associations (Editors Canada, the CIEP, ACES, the EFA, ...there's an Australian one whose acronym has slipped my mind). Researching the flavor of editing you're interested in will probably offer up avenues for study, too. For example, most US publishers/authors use iterations of the Chicago Manual of Style. Most UK publishers/authors use Hart's Rules/Oxford. Academic journals/schools/students have different style guides (APA, AMA, MLA, Harvard, Vancouver). Law uses the Blue Book. It's good to have working knowledge of a few style guides--and then you have to keep up with the changes (Chicago's 18th edition is coming out this year, and I hear some significant changes are afoot--such as fully embracing the singular they!).

The tl;dr here is that yes, there are a lot of writer-editors. But there are also a lot of editors who aren't writers at all, or who have no interest in becoming writers, or who don't want their writing and editing to overlap, or who edit because they like helping people and they value clarity. At the end of the day, editing and writing are two very different hats, and you don't necessarily need to wear both.

...this is already a bit long, but if you have other questions or want me to get more specific about something, please ask!

[michelle-ma-cherie]

i hate it when tutorials use the easiest example possible😭

like i get it you can cut pitch black curls with light concrete wall background - now try to do this with jannik's curls in front of clay😒

[mumblingsage]

After thinking on it, the "Write a publishable first draft and then only edit afterward if an outside force (editor, publisher) pushes you to" and the "Don't edit a word of your first draft, pour all out, then refine it over the course of 21 additional drafts" (I exaggerate...slightly) approaches have one thing in common:

The fear that you'll get so caught up in editing that you'll never actually make it to the end of your story. Whether that's the end of a complete draft, the plot all the way from beginning to end, or the end as in 'pencil down, I'm done changing things, let it go out into the world,' or both!

Which is to say, both theories view editing as a dangerous temptation.

Perhaps as seductive.

Perhaps as...fun?