Category: Editing

Cold beerBack in the old days, when my dad would take us all out in his LaSalle to the five-and-dime for a grape Nehi while Rudy Vallee warbled “Whole Lotta Love”… Um… Wait. They didn’t make LaSalles when my dad was born, Rudy Vallee had given way to big bands, and my earliest memory of a new song was “Something” by the Beatles when I still had not known the horror of kindergarten. Let’s start again. Back in high school, before the age of word processors, cloud storage, and AI, we were taught to write in drafts. In fact, my favorite English teacher Mr. Murphy (still going strong at 90!) told us to write out the first draft by hand before sending it across the typewriter.  Subsequent drafts, after chopping up with a red pen*, were to fix flow, spelling, typing, etc. If the truth be known, I was 30 before I could type, and by then, word processors and computers were a thing. 

But I stuck with the draft concept, though I rarely wrote longhand. My wrists don’t like it. And starting with the original Mrs. Hottle’s Canon word processor, the concept of typing all drafts took off. I no longer had to worry about margins. You could set a default font. You just typed, then saved to disk. Then came the PC and Microsoft Works. Then Word Perfect. Then Word. Many took it a step further with Scrivener. I’ll talk more about the various tools later.

As I started getting into professional markets, I met a writer named Dave White, now a school teacher in New Jersey. At the time, Dave was a grad student and just getting started as a novelist. Dave decided to abandon the draft concept. Everything is stored electronically, so you’re not rewriting (except when you are. Then you’re overwriting the original or copying and pasting. Or cutting.) So why make multiple files?

It’s a fair point. He’s been a more successful novelist than I’ve been, and, most importantly, the system works for him. Yet I still do drafts despite working in IT for [mumble mumble] years. Why?

Versioning. As Jim Winter, I wrote Holland Bay over a 12-year period, starting with a 105,000-word first draft that did not have a minor character who just had to spin up their own subplot. I didn’t so much finish the draft as stopped when a couple of the main characters finished their arcs. Additionally, I make much of how this series was inspired by 87th Precinct and The Wire. Rereading it, I realized at least two scenes were inadvertently copied from The Wire. You will never read that draft unless my family does something stupid like file my drafts with Wilmington College or my old high school. (Please don’t do that.) The second draft, while still considerably different, looks more like what you would buy today. But not entirely. Some point-of-view characters had to be pared down, extraneous scenes cut. And then an agent looked at it. She asked for a rewrite. Then I tweaked it to run past a Big Five publisher. Then Down & Out Books had some changes. All these versions are different files. Why? 

I work in IT. In fact, I work in software. I’m of the mindset that every version of something should be backed up so it’s available if you scrap a new version. Believe me, in both software and writing, that’s a huge concern. Now, I may be splitting hairs. If you came up when PCs were a thing, you probably back everything up. In fact, you likely store it in the cloud. Is that drafts? Well, most of us who do actual drafts are a bit more systematic about it.

As an editor, I receive manuscripts that are labeled “v03,” which means Down & Out went back and forth with the author before sending it to me. Plus they send me partially formatted manuscripts. I always keep the original version, whether it’s from a publisher or a freelance client, and make a copy labeled “_edited.” That’s both a signal to the writer this has been worked on and gives me a fall back in case something goes horribly wrong.

It all goes back to the old adage “Don’t fall in love with your first draft.” Sometimes, someone turns in a clean draft, and people like me just move commas around. But normally, a rough draft looks just like that. Rough. Have a system for the revisions. And stick to it.

 

*A rather pretentious roommate a former spousal unit and I had protested it was a blue pen, and we were not aloud to argue because she edited. Badly. And every agent, editor, and writer I’ve spoken to since has said, “Red pen.” Blue was for making photocopies in an age when the copier couldn’t see blue.

Writers get a lot of inspiration from music. From other writers. From poetry. It’s only natural they would want to quote it.

But can you?

Short answer: No. Unless it’s public domain, you need the creator’s permission. (Looking at you, Mark Zuckerberg! Stole two of my books to train his crappy AI. That’s another rant.) 

Long answer: Sometimes. Let’s be honest. Creators should be paid for their work. So if you’re lifting lyrics from Led Zeppelin (a band that knows a thing or two about having to settle plagiarism lawsuits, both as defendant and as plaintiff), Mr. Plant is probably going to send his lawyer after you. Or maybe not. Half a line from “Stairway…” is probably not going to land you in court. On the other hand, if you base your epic fantasy on “Achilles Last Stand” or “Battle of Evermore” and quote whole snatches of the song, Messrs. Page, Plant, Jones, and the widow and son of John Bonham are going to want either a cut of your royalties or a licensing fee. Now, if you use those songs as jumping off points (“Achilles…” itself comes from The Iliad, public domain since the Roman Empire overran Greece), no harm, no foul.

Similarly, trademarks can get dicey. When does a pop culture reference turn into trademark infringement? Also depends. In No Marigolds in the Promised Land, I referred to a type of rolling drone as “daleks,” with the narrator wondering where that name came from. At the time, the BBC was the sole arbiter of the Doctor Who trademarks. Their tendency was to let it be as long as these were balky robots and not the encased aliens with a speech impediment. Also, without thinking, I overused a Star Wars reference that went from something that would give George Lucas a chuckle to bringing a giant mouse in dark glasses and his giant duck enforcer to my front porch armed with brass knuckles and a cease-and-desist order. That got purged. The daleks?

I was advised to curtail them by an editor I knew, though I’ve seen references to Tardises (Tardii?) that clearly were not the multidimensional phone booth David Tenant uses to commute to work. I left a few references in, but regularly call them trashcan drones because, well, canonical Daleks look like giant garbage cans. So it’s likely anything so shaped and earning a name from a centuries-old pop culture reference is likely to do also look like a trashcan.  And it’s obvious they’re not out to ex-terminate! Ex-TERMINATE!

Even Tolkien might come after you. Lord of the Rings, still copyrighted in 2025, has a lot of trademarks. I can name a mountain chain “Misty Mountains” on a distant planet because CS Lewis’s language-obsessed buddy wasn’t the first to use that name, but deciding a desert region earned the literary reference name “Mordor” would not have flown. (Yes, I thought about it. Then I decided I knew nothing about Amargosa’s deserts as they didn’t do anything for the story.)

A friend of mine, when he sold his first novel, quoted song lyrics all the way through, usually to start chapters like Stephen King occasionally does. He got a surprise from his publisher when he received marching orders to secure permission from each of the songwriters. Most of them agreed, some tickled an author remembered them. (Pro tip: NEVER assume this. ALWAYS ask. This is NOT fair use. Ever.) Then he got a call. “Why do you want to use the song?” “Huh? Who is this?” “Neil.” “Neil who?” “Young.” “Yeah, feck off, Martin. I don’t have time for your jokes. I got an early class tomorrow!” Neil called back. They actually had a good conversation.

On the other hand, that same writer edited an anthology he invited me to. I wanted a character to paraphrase the a line from U-2’s “Hold Me Thrill Me Kiss Me Kill Me.” Would they care? “Not if you give them $200,000.” My house at the time was worth less than half that. (Mid-2000s, so… Cheap.) That was a hard no.

But paraphrasing is a way to get around quoting a song without stepping on the copyright holder’s toes. I’ve seen where AC/DC “thundered about a railroad track.” Most of you know what song that is. The rest can easily plug “AC/DC” and “railroad track” into Google and find out. Go ahead. You’ll be thunderstruck. 

A handful of bands and singers will allow snatches of lyrics to be quoted. You’ll need to get written permission, if only to cover your butt. And not every band will rush to your defense if they’ve sold off their catalog to an unscrupulous publisher. Yes, them that own the Beach Boys’ music managed to get Mike Love and Brian Wilson to team up, at least on Twitter, as they trolled them over a lawsuit against Katy Perry for her own “California Girls.” (If you sue over your own IP, and the creators flame you on social media, you can pretty much kiss your case goodbye.)

Now, what about character names? I get dragged by betas (who should know better by this point, having read the entire series) over a diminutive engineer named “Peter Lancaster,” with a rather familiar accent and libido. (Connor Duffy of Compact Universe fame constantly asks him how he hasn’t been court-martialed yet.) Again, this is suggestive of Tyrion Lannister and the brilliant actor who plays him, Peter Dinklage. However, it just made the character come together. But what if I named a character “James T. Kirk” or “Anakin Skywalker”?

Yeah, do that and you might start getting some rude letters from high-priced attorneys for Paramount or Disney. They get a bit worked up over that. (Lucas, however, still enforces the parodies-are-funny rule despite selling Star Wars to Disney. Suck it, Mickey.) You’ve probably met a James Kirk, so you might be able to shrug and say, “Well, I never watched Star Trek.” On the other hand, a world-weary detective named “Jim Bond” might get annoyed with all the Sean Connery imitations he has to put up with. (“Oh, wow. My girlfriend’s name is Moneypenny. I’ve never heard that before. Well, not counting the thousand times just last week.”) There, it’s a pop culture reference that likely will not ruffle the feathers of the Fleming or Broccoli families. (No one cares what Kevin McClory’s family thinks, since they sold Blofeld to Eon and, subsequently, Amazon.) But anything named Skywalker tramples on well-established trademarks. And we all know the Mouse is already displeased with Winnie the Pooh horror films now that their original copyright has expired. 

In the end, use common sense. You can get away with references to Twain, Shakespeare, or Dickens because they’re public domain. Your main concern should be how the reader will interpret it. On the other hand, Sherlock Holmes is also public domain as far as copyright is concerned, but the Doyle estate still owns the trademarks. That’s right.  They can still sue you if you still cross a line. You can bet they had a hand in the making of Robert Downey Jr’s turn as Holmes, Sherlock, Elementary, and most recently, Watson. 

And really, it’s someone else’s work. Orcs may not be original to Tolkien. Per Tolkien himself, it’s from Anglo-Saxon and appears in Beowulf.  Uruk Hai might earn you a nastygram from Christopher Tolkien’s solicitor. Similarly, Starfleet (Jimi Hendrix’s references notwithstanding), Jedi, and Brown Coats will get you in trouble. 

So, if you’re wondering if it’s fair use, if you’re describing something in someone else’s work or paraphrasing lyrics, yes. It is. If you’re lifting characters, prose, or lyrics wholesale from something where the creator hasn’t passed away in the last 75 years, you might want to rethink that.

Wadded paperPublishers, especially those in small press, are traumatized by how too many manuscripts come in. Goofy fonts. Weird margins. Author never read the guidelines. (Pro tip: If you’re asking someone to sell your work for you, they make the rules on formatting. End of discussion.) But it gets witchy for editors, too.  However, I get it. Writers have so much anxiety about query letters (Maybe agents need to quit talking so much about that. All they do is induce performance anxiety.), acceptance and rejection, and getting seen! And if it’s a first-time novelist, and you’re the lucky editor who gets to read them, you’re reading someone’s baby!

Do a couple of these things, meet with some success, and you, the writer, slowly learn that the final draft for the freelance editor, the agent, or the publisher is a reprieve from the Thing That Will Not Die. Because that shiny new story is a millstone around your neck a year or two later. And while a lot of writers enjoy working with their editors, opening that Word doc with all the track changes turned on usually results in the writer growling, “Oh, what fresh hell is this?” (Because the Thing won’t Die! You still have revisions. Especially if there’s a developmental edit step.)

But how should the manuscript look when it goes to the publisher, agent, or freelance editor?

Most publishers and agents want a specific format: Times New Roman, 12-point font, double-spaced. There’s a title page with the estimated word count and your contact info at the top and the title and your pen name (even if it’s you’re real name. If it’s a pseudonym, put the pen name in quotes.) halfway down the page. If you are subbing print–rare these days, and thank God for small miracles–pagination on every page following the title page is required. If submitting electronically, don’t paginate. Use “#” for scene breaks. Dedication is optional, as are acknowledgments and about the author, but copyright is not needed, even if you registered it. That will be added on publication.

For freelance editors, it’s even easier. Word, Google Docs, OpenOffice all track word counts, so we just need the title page and your prose. However, same rules apply. Times New Roman, 12 point, and double-spaced. 

“But why don’t you want page numbers?”

Well, unless I’m looking at a hard copy, which I assure you I will not until your tome is out in the wild, I can see the page numbers in the lower left-hand corner of Word. 

“What if the publisher wants something different from what you described?”

That brings me to the most important thing a writer can remember about submitting any kind of manuscript: Read the bloody guidelines! This means you. 

“But I want my book to look a certain way. Why can’t I format it?”

Because your book, even if all we do is move commas around and make snarky comments about something funny you wrote, your manuscript and all its carefully formatted pages are going to get altered. At this point, we, the editors, don’t care. Neither should you. One reason is all those funky things you do with formatting come when it’s time to send the book to press. The formatter does that. (I offer formatting services, by the way, just not while I’m editing the book. One step at a time, kiddo.) We are focused on the prose. How are the words strung together. Do you use the Oxford comma or are you wrong? (Another pro tip: Helpful if you tell me your stance on that before I begin reading your manuscript. The publisher will tell you whether you use the Oxford comma or not. An agent has no business having a position on that for anything but their own writing.) 

Formatting, if I may beat the dead horse, is how the book will look in print. And if you even partially format a manuscript that has, at best, only a beta read or two, you’re wasting your time. Words are going to move around. Besides, the bigger the publisher, the less control you have over how the book looks, what cover you have, etc. Just because you want that chapter to end on page 34 doesn’t mean that will survive even a proofread.

Instead, focus on sharpening your prose. Read the submission guidelines. If they’re not specific, the above–Time New Roman, 12-point, double-spaced–is sufficient, along with a title page (if subbing to an agent or publisher.) That’s all you need. The formatter will take it from their when your editor is finished.

My current project has em dashes in place of quotation mQuotation markarks, which is a challenge. Em dashes (or for the more pedantic, dialog dashes. Hate to burst your bubble, nitpickers, but the readers who pick up on this don’t care. Neither do I.) are generally used in Romance languages like Spanish, Italian, or French. I’m not sure why writers in English–any dialect of English–choose to do this, but then Cormac McCarthy dispensed with quotation punctuation altogether.

But having to adapt to a different style of quoting dialog underscores another issue: You still have to follow the rules of dialog. And to follow said rules, the reader has to know who’s talking and when. Even the great Lawrence Block, whose books taught me to write novels long before Stephen King graced us with On Writing, munged dialog once. If the greats do it, you need to watch out, too.

So, let’s review, shall we?

  • “Said” is an invisible word. It takes less than second for the reader to blow by a “said” phrase to pick up on whose talking.
  • That said, the old chestnut of not using any word but “said” (except maybe “asked”) needs to be put down like Old Yeller. (Um… Spoiler alert?) In an age of audio books, it is absolutely nerve-grating to hear “said” twenty-six times in a thirty-second passage. Yes, you can use mild alternatives like “shouted,” “mumbled,” even “intoned.” Just don’t get fancy with it. There’s a reason more old-school editors insist on “said/asked.” “‘Well,’ he queried” is still bad writing no matter how much you’re bored with “said.” </rant>
  • Action beats are your friend. You don’t have to tag every line of dialog. In fact, don’t. Dialog-heavy scenes have the disadvantage of encouraging “white rooms.” Two characters are talking. Where are they talking? What’s going on? Half the time, it’s just exposition, and exposition is death in our era of short attention spans. Sorry, but that’s the reality we’re working in today. Have your characters eat a salad or lift weights or knit a sweater. Anything to convey where the conversation takes place.
  • When exposition is unavoidable, put the Pope in a pool. This is one of my favorite storytelling tools from Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat. He talks about a movie where a bunch of cardinals have to set up the movie and can only do it through rambling dialog. So the screenwriter put an old man in a swimming pool listening to the cardinals. It takes the viewers a minute or two to figure out the guy swimming is the Pope. They get an infodump, but their attention is held because they’re forced to figure out who’s in the pool. (I loved that so much, I put a character named “Mr. Pope” in a swimming pool in one story. Then I killed him in that same pool in another story. Yes. As an author, I’m mean to my characters.)
  • Untagged dialog: No more than five lines before you insert a “said/asked/pontificated” (Don’t use that last one. The reader will throw your book in the trash, and for good reason) or an action beat. The reader needs to keep track of who’s talking. And so do you.
  • Tagging or adding beats: If two people are in the conversation, unless they are the same gender, get their names out quickly and stick with he/she/they*. Once you’ve established who and what they are, the reader can pretty much follow along. More than one person? Or two of the same gender? You’re going to need to drop names a little more often. 

*The common use of singular they today is not political. It’s the means by which I get to spike the football on a pedantic English teacher’s grave. My favorite English teacher, who just turned 90, would heartily approve.

Wadded paperI’ve had people ask if I’m harder on the books small presses send me than I am ones where the author pays me. The answer: I’m harder on the author as a client.

Now, why is that, since the client usually pays more and is paying me directly? Simple. As an author, you expect certain things of the publisher from all but the smallest presses. This book should already be vetted. The publisher will likely flag any major issues. In one case, I had a tale with supernatural elements that probably should have had a developmental edit, but I was able to meet with the author in person. Going back and reading that book just as a reader, I now have a better understanding of what to ask and what to flag. (Plus, that guy sent me notes for the next one.)

So why be harder on the writer as a client? Simple. I write indie. So I know the writer chasing an agent or a publisher or even going indie is flying without a net. So my edits are going to be deeper. I’m going to cut (and add) more if I don’t think you’re getting your point across, and a bit less lenient on tangents. (I know. As an author, I love my tangents, too. Hurts to kill your darlings, but we can’t all be Stephen King. And even Steve and his editors cut a lot of stuff.) Why? There’s no one, except maybe beta readers, who will tell you when that pronoun should have been a name because you have more than two people in the same conversation. “He said…” Okay, if there are two hes in the conversation, which “he”? If it’s a man and a woman, and they’re the only two people in the conversation, then we’re fine. 

It’s the writer clients who get the long-winded explanations about drive-ups. I’m harder on run-ons with them. Most clients I get for copy editing are newer writers, so I need to help them put their best foot forward with an agent or an acquisitions editor. Yes, experienced writers break the rules, but we’ve been following them for years. So we know when coloring outside the lines looks artistic (We hope!) vs. looking like your two-year-old niece or nephew savaging a coloring book with whatever Crayola they grabbed first.

That’s not to say I don’t get some challenges from Down & Out or other publishers. My very first client I like to say has been doing this longer than I’ve been alive. And I’m just barely old enough to remember when Abbey Road was new. (I also was a toddler. Make of that what you will.) His original editor was Ruth Cavin at St. Martin’s Press, who is still considered a giant in the crime fiction field. My initial client’s manuscripts are not as clean as, say, Jim Fusilli’s, who writes for The Wall Street Journal. Editing Jim is basically moving commas around, half of which I’m pretty sure Jim stetted. The other client is used to pushing it to the deadline, so there’s an expectation (as expressed in feedback) that I’m going to have suggestions how to clean it up. So far, it works, and he’s put out some pretty good books since I started working with him.

And then we have the anthologies. Usually, they’re as much fun to edit as they are to write for. (Okay, I actually prefer writing for them. Less time, except less money.) But even that’s a challenge. Half of mine have Michael Bracken as the main editor, and Michael has sent me several “Go with God” emails after learning I got the copy edit assignment. Why? Short story author A will submit a story with almost no corrections. Yes, that actually happens. Author B can’t consistently capitalize or lower-case a proper noun. Author C is a lawyer. They capitalize EVERYTHING! (Sidenote: My last author was actually a district court judge. He did NOT capitalize everything.)

In the end, it’s what serves the reader best. Sometimes, I’ll leave an entire passage as nothing but sentence fragments because that’s how the author writes, and the reader will just get confused if I try to fix it. Plus, you try to fix every damn sentence in a book. Usually, by page 2, you have the writer’s rhythm and cadence. As an editor, don’t mess with it unless it’s unreadable. Because isn’t that why you hand off to an editor?

Man runningApologies to Steve Perry

As a writer, I have a problem. And it’s one of my pet peeves as a writer.

Ever read a sentence that seems to go on forever? To the point where you forgot what the author was saying in the beginning? You’ve seen them, especially in first-person novels. The author starts out with one thought, then, through the magic of “and” or “but,” adds a related thought. Okay, all good so far. Then there’s another and/but or even just a comma. In most European languages, we are hard-wired to look for a period. The brain wants to move this out of short-term memory and into the neurological databanks. The longer it has to wait, the harder that gets.

Especially with today’s short attention spans. 

As writers, particularly newer writers, people tend to throw in as much detail as they can. In a rough draft, this is good. I know a few writers who’ve abandoned the idea of “drafts,” since 99% of everything is now electronic. The principle still holds. When you make revisions, you tend to cut more than add. Most of the early cutting comes from too much detail. Sometimes, this results in a run-on sentence. If anything prompts me, as a reader, to put down the book, it’s run-on sentences. As an editor?

Well, I’m gonna chop up that lengthy epic within a paragraph brutally. A lot of times, you’re trying to put in everything you think the reader needs. Or you go off on tangents, particularly if you’re pantsing. Or it’s all one big sentence in your head. A lot of run-ons could be broken up into paragraphs unto themselves. On occasion, I’ve been known to simply toss out a long one. That, of course, requires a comment explaining why I just tossed the author’s hard work into the recycle bin. It’s drifting into rewriting, and I will not do rewriting if I can avoid it. It’s seldom been done to me as a writer, and I think I owe my clients the same courtesy. Hence my rant a while back about editors bragging about cutting. It ain’t about you, Seamus.* 

Short stories provide the biggest challenge. You have a limited amount of space to convey information. Short stories are generally 1000-5000 words, with some longer but not by much. The temptation is to cram in as much information as you can, hoping the reader gets everything. It’s also where the most cutting occurs. In a short story, the fewer POVs, the less backstory, the fewer characters, the better. In a novel, you can wade in, take side trips, be as detailed as you want (within reason). The average novel these days in 90,000 words. Scifi novels regularly check in between 100K and 120K.  But a 5000 word short? There’s not only not much room for world building but none for run-ons.

But I’ve run on enough about that.

*Not an actual editor. The only Seamus I’ve ever known was my brother’s dog, who loved Pink Floyd for some reason.

Grim ReaperI once read an email to another writer from a zine editor about how he handled manuscripts. “The first thing we do is cut. We cut and cut and cut.”

The more I edit, the more annoyed I get with that comment because that’s how the editor led his message. Editing does involve cutting, but bragging about it is not the best way to instill confidence in a writer. It reminded me of a college professor I had who bragged he failed 80% of his students. If you’re a college instructor doing your program’s capstone course, and 80% of your students fail, maybe you should consider another line of work. I look at editing the same way. 

Now, I’ve known my share of great editors over the years. Ellen Campbell (who gleefully calls herself “the Cutter,” but I’ll get to that in a minute), Jim Thomsen, and Stacy Robinson, my first and still only developmental editor. All three of them make suggestions. And they have good instincts when the writer will have anxiety over a change. Ellen, in particular, wants to be challenged. To her, that’s an opportunity to both teach the writer and learn something. 

But going back to my early days writing, I can recall a rather well-respected freelance editor who admitted she felt she had to be openly hostile to a manuscript. Two years into this job, and I still ask myself, “Why?” 

Of course, anyone who writes begins with the attitude of red ink and red track changes are “a dagger to the soul.” I’m not making that up. A would-be writer from my days of cosplay (when it was just weird grown-ups in costumes) said that as we made a go of a Klingon-themed fanzine. It’s fine in the beginning. We all get precious about our work. It’s our passion. But there comes a time where, if you’re serious, even if you’re just throwing books up on Amazon, you have to start shedding your artistic pretensions. Everyone thinks it’s cute when you walk around the house clutching the manuscript to that first novel, muttering, “My baby! My baby!” I did that, and I have a rather…complicated attitude toward my first novel. You also have to quit being precious about the prose. Sure, Anne Rice once openly bragged about how “Every word is perfect!” No, it’s not, Anne–May you rest in peace. I’ve read a couple of your books.

 

In his classic writing book, On Writing, Stephen King outlines what I’ve modeled for novels. First, write with the door closed. King says this is so you can focus on the story. Now, having been the inspiration for a couple of other writers, I can honestly say it’s also so your friends, relatives, and coworkers won’t kill you. Too many writers want everyone else to read excerpts from whatever they wrote today. No one wants to read an unfinished story because you haven’t finished it yet. Trust me, I got burned in the fanfic days for not having a long-ass trilogy fleshed out ahead of time. (I was a notorious pantser until I got into original scifi.)

King suggests cutting 10% of your first draft. Why? You’re throwing in everything because you don’t know what you need. I describe what I do in a copy edit as trimming the fat. In a dev edit or a story analysis, I trim a LOT of fat. But those changes are structural. In a copy edit, I look at it this way: Was is not your friend. Run-on sentences are bad. Droning on and on about some side detail just bores the reader. King is emphatic about zapping anything ending in “-ly.” Some editors get livid about describing eyes moving, though I’ve always found that to be more annoying than helpful. 

My personal pet peeve are the walk-ups, first pointed out to me by television writer and producer Lee Goldberg. Lee got annoyed when the star (and executive producer) of a show he wrote for insisted on “walk-ups” or “drive-ups.” Since this actor started out in sports, memorizing dialog was more of a challenge than, say, Henry Winkler, who made up a Shakespeare soliloquy on the fly when he forgot his lines in an audition. It was more training than skill as I recall the guy being a fair actor in action roles (and a couple of turns in comedy.) The star wanted scenes where his character drove to the scene, got out of his car, walked up to the door, and knocked. Like this explanation, the walk-ups took up a lot of space.  I’ve noticed them in quite a few manuscripts. 

Cutting is trimming the fat. Bragging about cutting is just showing what a bad ass you think you are to the writer. Cutting and explaining why you cut is in service to the reader and helpful to the writer. That 10% King talks about can be trimmed organically and without rancor. All hostility does is instill fear or a strong urge to get away from a person. If it’s the editor, trust me, they’re not going to have a lot of work. If it’s the writer, well, having a few diva moments of my own on that front, I can attest to the backlash you get for it. 

Robot readingI have something to tell you. It may be hard for you to hear, but as a potential client–mine or someone else’s–you need to hear this. Are you ready?

Editors are human.

There. I said it.

Oh, we may use software tools to do our jobs. Some of us rely solely on The Chicago Manual of Style or The Elements of Style or even the more recent and user-friendly Actually, The Comma Goes Here (Hat tip to Michael Bracken for revealing that one to me.) Some of us even edit by memorized rules and years of experience, an elite few even turning off spell check and grammar check. Ooooh!

Actually, even in the days of typed manuscripts and few or no computers, those last editors were freaks of nature. I’m pretty sure Stephen King’s editors or the great Ruth Cavin at St. Martin’s Press kept at least The Elements of Style and/or The Chicago Manual of Style handy.

But editors are human. I’ve caught mistakes by the best. I’ve been called out by a couple of authors of mine, one of whom requested me again, the other who gave me a blurb. They want the best prose possible. Hey, have you ever told your mechanic you want your car done a certain way after they did a job for you? If there’s a little back and forth, that mechanic knows what you want, and you just gave them a new way to fix your car. (Maybe a bad example. Unless you’re customizing, cars are pretty rigid.)

Every author has, or should have, a stet privilege. I’ve had three editors at Down & Out. The first had some bizarre preferences for style, like “a-m” instead of “AM” (my preference, and I usually try to tell an editor that up front) or the standard “a.m.” The others have been Chris Rhatigan, whose presence is missed by those of us on Down & Out’s roster of authors, and Dawn Barclay, whom I’ve also edited. I probably stetted more suggestions on Chris than Dawn, but both of them, at least as editors, hew pretty close to my editing style. In Chris’s case, he had to deal with more made-up place names than Dawn did.

I’ve had others, including beta readers, who did full-on edits. I had one, whom I hope dug his heels in and started editing himself, who tended to treat the rules as iron-clad. No passive voice. Absolutely everything shown, even the most irrelevant details. Especially because that was an independently published book, I stetted. No harm, no foul, because I knew more coming out of that set of revisions than I knew going in. I’ve had some where I’d end up spotting glaring errors in the final copy. (“Dude, did you even read this?”) Most of those were zine editors who couldn’t be arsed, to use a quaint English phrase, as they had a huge stack of submissions to go through. Most have been good.

But a few things editors have to deal with which you may be blissfully unaware as we carve up your manuscript:

  • We can’t memorize every grammar rule out there. Oh, we have the style guides and ProWritingAid/PerfectIT/etc. to highlight errors. Or we may be whizzes at trimming up prose and making it as lean as possible. But in the end, we’re not perfect.
  • The more errors in a manuscript, the more get past us. Really, if you have a ton of misspellings or misplaced commas or even run-ons and excess passive voice, we’re going to miss some errors simply because we’re busy fixing the last one. It’s human nature, and even software tools either don’t catch everything or, as I’ve discovered, you spend a lot of time smacking the tool’s hand. (“No, stupid, that’s a made-up name! Stop correcting it!” Note to ProWritingAid’s developers: Entity name suggestions desperately need a Disable Rule function. 90% of them are a waste of time, and the other 10%, most of us can spot it without an assist.) Plus, any editor worth his salt is going to use Track Changes or equivalent, which results in a lot of red text and commented passages. So that oddball tense change you stuck in the third sentence of the paragraph where I chopped up your run-on? Well, all that red ink and highlighting just camouflaged it. Sorry.
  • You’re not the only writer on our dance card. If you’ve hired a freelance editor, keep in mind they have other clients. Sometimes, you get lucky and hire someone new to the biz, when they’re cheap and available. A lot of times, when you make an inquiry, we get excited as soon as we know the estimated cost (because, hey, new business!), but just the same, we sweat how we’re going to properly slot your work between the current project and the one booked after yours. It’s not just the fee, it’s the time. And if you’re publishing for a small press or hiring someone who edits for one, projects come pretty much on a conveyor belt. The publisher has a schedule to keep, which means we have to stay on top of the workload. But you need proper attention. Otherwise, you wouldn’t hire us.
  • Developmental editing is always expensive. I paid about a grand to a dev editor (who taught me developmental editing. Bless you, Stacy. Bless you.) That was cheap, mainly because she was new. I charge roughly $2500 depending on initial word count (payment plans negotiable.) I’ll do a story analysis, which is like a dev edit but with only a light copy edit and without the workshopping sessions over chat or phone, just copious notes and an outline, for a fraction of that. Copy edits are based on word count, but there’s more wiggle room to negotiate.
  • Having mentioned money, it should still always be about the reader. You know. The people you want to buy your books. I don’t work with clients who lecture me about their genius or how this is going to upend the literary world. I’ve not only been that writer (that lasted about five minutes before I got put in my place), I dealt with one, who tuned around and sent me three of the most abusive emails anyone’s ever sent me. Blocked on email, social media, and even Paypal. I also know editors who edit for the sake of editing. Uh-huh. Let’s say you get a project from Jim Fusilli, a Wall Street Journal columnist whom I’ve edited. Well, actually, Jim is so good, I basically proofread, moving the odd comma around and chopping maybe one run-on sentence. Are you telling me you’re going to cut anyway because you cut on principle? Now you’re editing to edit, not editing for the reader, not helping the writer.
  • Don’t take it personally. You paid for someone’s expertise. Flawed or not, you should know more once you have all that red ink back than when you sent in the clean manuscript. If you disagree with something, ask the editor why they flagged what they flagged. Most of us are also writers. In fact, if we edit, we get some good conversations going. Dawn Barclay and I had some really good conversations ahead of her edits on my Jim Winter collection, Winter of Discontent. (Sorry, no release date yet.) Helps that I edited one of Dawn’s anthologies, so we knew each other’s thinking already.
  • One editor will always change what another editor did. I’ve done it. Dawn did it to me, as about 75% of Winter of Discontent came from webzines over the last 25 years. Some of the previous editors I still know. And I once carved up a novel that was a bestseller a decade ago (even won awards*.) He was one of those who gave me a blurb (and some very useful pushback.) I have to purge a contemporary reference from No Marigolds in the Promised Land and am contemplating moving Bad Religion and Road Rules to a new publisher. Quite likely, as I did most of the editing on those myself, I will go through each of them and yell, “Hottle, what the hell were you thinking?!?!” (And I will edit the day after writing this and scold myself for using “?!?!” So far, only Nathan Singer has resisted purging that, and you have to read Nathan to understand why.)

We’re human. But we’re usually as objective as we can be. The best of us ask, “How’s the reader going to see this?” If we do that, we’ve given you a filter to look at your own work. That’s what you hired us to do.

*But not a major award. Sadly, that author doesn’t have a leg lamp in his living room. Unless he bought it on Amazon or eBay.

Phil Collins singing "Turn It on Again"
“I… I… IIIIIII!!!!”
Source: Genesis official YouTube channel

One bane of every writer, including this one, is watching how you start sentences, particularly in first person. I don’t mean sentence fragments. A newer editor and writer complained about that, to which I said, “I not only use them all the time, I once edited a book written almost entirely in fragments.” He was horrified, but the book, a two-week copy edit, would have taken more like six weeks or had to have gone back to the author for another trip across the keyboard. But there is one error I flag because, as a writer, I know it’s invisible during the creation process but will drive readers batty.

That opening word on every sentence in a given paragraph. I mentioned first person up front because it’s also the hardest to avoid, hardest to edit, and hardest for the writer to fix if it goes beyond the limits of a copy edit. Unless we’re in a developmental edit, where we’re already killing darlings and moving scenes around, I don’t rewrite. That’s not my job. My job is to flag where the prose needs tightened up. Even in a developmental edit, I’d flag a troublesome paragraph with a comment. (Thank you, Word. Thank you, Scrivener. Thank you, Google Docs.)  In first person, it’s hard not to start every sentence with “I.”

“I” is the most common word in a first-person narrative. The narrator is telling you a story, and the narrator, more often than not, is the protagonist–or thinks they are. So, you can have two or three paragraphs where the narrator starts every single sentence with “I.” Also in first person, it’s the hardest to fix. If it’s too onerous, I highlight and comment that it needs reworded. I can just see the writer cringing as they read that note. I can also hear them going “D’oh!” As a writer, I can relate.

But “I” is not the only offending word. “You” (usually in dialog), “he/she/they,” and, to my surprise, “the” are frequent offenders. And this frequently gets through a couple rounds of revision before I even see it. Like I said, it’s invisible when you’re writing.

Two instances where I won’t flag anything. The first is across paragraphs. If you use editing tools like I do (because having a digital flashlight helps considerably) you notice apps like ProWritingAid don’t like multiple sentences starting with “I/You/The/etc.”  regardless of paragraphs and dialog. The trouble is the reader doesn’t care. Even with action beats and dialog tags, everything inside the quotation marks is a new thought. And everything in other paragraphs should be separate thoughts. This happens, then this happens, then someone says this. So I ignore it. If it bugs the writer, then the writer can fix it.

The other case is when it’s deliberate. Someone is hammering a point home. “You never pick up your laundry. You never take your dishes to the sink. You never put the toilet seat down. You are a slob.” (Scenes from my first apartment. I wonder how that girlfriend is doing these days? Also, I do put laundry away and take dishes to the sink. Um… Maybe I’ll save that story for the new TS Hottle Substack in a couple of weeks. šŸ˜‰ ) There, it’s deliberate, almost poetic, and probably humorous. I know some editors who will flag it because they think it’s their job to apply rules instead of make the prose more readable. That’s editing for editing’s sake, and frankly, no one knows or remembers the editor. They do know the writer, who has the power of the almighty Stet when doing revisions. (Incidentally, I did precious few stets with Chris Rhatigan, my predecessor at Down & Out, and Dawn Barclay, now my colleague at that vaunted crime press. We all have similar approaches. And as a writer, they get me.)

A particularly aggressive editor might flag everything. This is not malicious, and if you think that red ink is a stab at the soul, think again. It’s to make you, the writer, think before you stet. I’ve only met one editor who got overly aggressive with applying rules (and his show-don’t-tell example was the most absurd abuse of that chestnut I’ve ever seen), but unless they are rookies, those editors are few. The right editor won’t care (much) about the writer’s feelings, but they damn well better think of the reader, who’s going to be buying your prose. And sometimes, that means breaking the rules for readability.

 

*With apologies to Adrian Belew

CrutchesA while back, I wrote about crutch words and the approach I took to weeding them out. A working editor is a work in progress, and I am no exception. I developed a four-word approach to “Words That Must Be Scrutinized!!!” (Cue really loud gong.) The offending words are “suddenly,” “just,” “very,” and “that.” Yes, “that” can be a crutch word. The story analysis project I’m finishing up as I write this also abused “and.” Mind you, the author is an admitted first-time writer who does not speak US English trying to write in US English. English as a first language is weird enough. I get headaches rendering an alien language into Elizabethan English to convey excessive formality, so I get it.

I’ve modified since then. I don’t do a “that” check anymore. That is used more often legitimately than as a crutch, so you could easily get a thousand instances of it in a long manuscript. ProWritingAid is pretty good at flagging it when it’s used to join a long sentence together. Never say “The fact that…” Just say “The fact…”

But I got so zealous about purging and replacing “that” with “who,” “how,” and “which,” that I got pushback from both author and publisher. (The author turned around and wrote a blurb for my editing work, so it’s a case of making good better.) So now, I look to see if “that” is unnecessary in context. 

I still go after “very” and “suddenly.” In fact, I get mad if I can’t delete “suddenly.” “Just” remains a sticking point. It’s the most abused of the three. One writer, who’s been around for decades, had seven instances on one page! It is a monumental pain in the ass to weed those out, and in a couple of instances, I had to leave two on the page. But it’s a crutch word.

Once upona, I used to go after “should” because Bestelling Authorā„¢, who had a writing courseĀ®, said it’s a bad word. Probably is. Too many “shoulds” on a page will annoy the reader without them realizing why. I quit doing that because it ended up giving me stilted prose in my own work and annoyed an editing client early on. This is also I don’t do writing books. I publish independently or small press, so until they start showing up on bestseller lists or I have a waiting list for my services, I’m not going to be a shill and pretend to know more than I do. Here, I’m sharing what I see on the job. 

So it’s “very,” “suddenly,” and “just.” I’ve added one more because I caught it in print in one of my own books: form. Why is “form” bad? It’s not as long as you are filling out a form, you’re admiring that other person’s cute form, or your mother-in-law, in her rage, assumes her demon form.* But every so often, in the heat of writing, we type “form” instead of “from.” It’s something that even an editor can miss. We’re not perfect, and two errors can hide a third in plain site. So I check all the instances of “form.” 99% of the time, they’re all correct. That remaining one percent usually sees a character bopping out to Sinatra singing “The Girl Form Ipamena.” So, yeah, the writer probably wants to know about that typo.

As I said before, different editors have different approaches. Some will zap anything with an “-ly” in it. Some have long lists of words they never want to see in a manuscript again. Others just read it in context and decide if it sticks out like a sore cliche.  

* Actually, my mother-in-law is a sweet 80-year-old lady. My ex-mother-in-law is a nice Mormon lady with a decidedly un-Mormon sense of humor who definitely gave it to her daughter. Who happens to be my favorite ex. I’ve married often. And well. Not many people can say that.