Watch your language

March 28th, 2012

My mother used to call me a slut.

One step into my bedroom and she’d cast her eyes despairingly to the ceiling and berate me for my sluttish behaviour. It wasn’t until we’d lived in Australia for several years that things changed and she would comment only on the untidiness of my room.

This was not because of any change in behaviour on my part (despite my parents’ best efforts to get me to “do something about that pigsty”) but because they’d finally worked out that the word had an entirely different meaning in this country than it had back home.

Fast forward a few years and this particular word is almost universally used primarily in the “immoral” sense.

Language, then, is important. It’s important when you’re a schoolkid trying to fit in – even if you appear to speak the same language as your peers, slightly different word choices can lead to embarrassment if not actual miscommunication – and it’s important if you’re a writer, trying to set a scene.

This time last year, I wrote a similar post on building worlds. Lately I’ve read a lot of stories set in places that are clearly foreign to the authors writing them, so I’d like to return to the theme of worldbuilding from a language perspective.

The internet has made it easy to research countries and cities, and even different industries. With enough time and effort it can be relatively straightforward to build up a fictional set of characters livingfootpath in a real-world place. But picking up those subtle language differences is not so easy – and it’s not always obvious that there are differences, unless you’re looking for them.

The most common issue encountered in my writing/reading/editing bubble is the use of American English when a scene, its characters and even the narrator are intended to be English or Australian – and this differentiation must certainly work the other way for American readers/writers/editors.

Often, people flag footpath versus sidewalk as the most obvious writer “tell”, but there are more subtle differences of which to be aware. For example:

Once they have traversed the walkway of their choice, do your characters buy their groceries from a shop or a store? And how do they carry their shopping home – in bags or sacks?

Do they snack on biscuits or crackers? If they tuck into a packet of chips, does that mean a steaming hot bag of fries or a nice pack of crisps?

Do they take cream or milk in their tea? Or do they prefer a nice bottle of fizz? Or pop? Or just a plain old soft drink?

Where do they live? In a house or a cottage? Or perhaps they prefer a more urban lifestyle and they’ve shacked up in a flat/apartment/unit/condo…

Clothing can be a conundrum, too. If a character puts their pants on, does that mean he has his trousers on or that she’s clad in nowt but her knickers? If they’re sporting a rather fetching vest, should this include a pocket-watch adornment, or is this another word for undershirt?

Narration, as well as dVestsialogue, will need to fit too. Natural style for a UK or Australian speaker is usually:  “come and sit down,” or “go and get your sister,” where US style is to drop the and: “come sit down, ” or “go get your sister,”* – subtle but notable differences. US style also allows for gotten and anyways, which are not typical of UK or Australian English.**

From an editing standpoint (because we tend to check these things) this goes even further. Are any of your characters experts in their field? It’s important to not only know the language of their industry but how the experts use it – including their colloquialisms and jargon. This can be key to your story and it’s vital to note that the manner in which the public commonly uses an industry’s terms is not necessarily the way the experts wield the same words.

IT is a perfect example here, where terms are commonly misused by everyday folk and it’s easy to assume that tech experts will use the same colloquialisms, when in fact they are as precise as any doctor with their wording, even when they bandy jargon about.***

Do your research. If you’re setting your story somewhere with which you are unfamiliar, don’t just rely on the interwebs to show you where that country town is or how many Tube stops are involved in your characters’ travels. Concentrate on the language as well as the layout of your world.

If you can’t visit your intended setting, watch television shows and read books from that area – they’ll give you a good feel for dialogue and language culture. If your story is set in a specific time, be it the distant past or the present, do the same and take note of how words and language may have changed – even a couple of years can make a difference. If you’re going to write about a field or industry outside your own experience, don’t just talk to experts about their work – check that your fictional expert is using the jargon correctly, too.

The right language adds fine detail to your worldbuilding. Get it right and your reader will be an armchair traveller, mentally meandering the streets  you describe with the ease and familiarity of a local (which, of course, they may well be!). Get one word wrong and they can be as easily thrown out of the story. The believability is strained, the narration rings false. If those details are wrong, thinks the reader, what else is untrustworthy in this tale?

How do you craft your language? And what words throw you out of a story?

*    And yes, there’d be different punctuation here as well. I’m not entering that argument here.

**   Of course there is some slipover. Americanisms and UKisms and Aussieisms cross oceans and borders with merry abandon. But unless it has been adopted into common use, an editor will likely adjust for local style. So even though, for example, “gotten” is being adopted into colloquial use in this country, it’s totes not something many editors would let pass just yet.

***  For more information on this, speak to any IT guru you know who has had to help someone fix anything on their computer. (This will be *every* IT guru you know.) Ask if you can watch next time someone asks for tech help. Marvel at the array of facial expressions deployed by said expert as they try to translate what *exactly* this person means when they say their computer is “broken” and describes the elements involved.

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Use and misuse of language – get amongst it

November 2nd, 2011

The more observant among* you may have noticed it’s been a while** since I last updated this blog. This is in part due to the demands of Real Life, which recently included attendance at Conflux and involvement in the National Editors National Editors Conference 2011Conference.

Each of these were opportunities to meet fellow editors and writers, and to discuss language. And many arguments were had by all.

Many. Arguments.

Universal wisdom, nay, the RULE that guides all editors, states the editor’s job is to make the written word plain and simple for the reader. Take out flowery language, antiquated words and jargon, and replace them with plain English and functional phrasing.

But here’s the thing. Rules, as we’re also told, are made to be broken.

I don’t always think the plainest wording is the right wording. I certainly think any text – whether it’s a business brief or a fantasy novel – needs to be clear and easy to understand, but I also think you need to remember the audience and the purpose of the chosen words. (And if you’re the editor, rather than the writer, it’s worth considering that the writer may well have chosen specific word types for a specific reason before you impose blanket changes on a document.)

Flow, structure, intent, resonance, connotation etc. also need to be considered as you “clean up” your own or someone else’s writing.

The plain English argument comes up all the time and, of course, it was discussed many times during the National Editors Conference. One of the clearest off-the-cuff moments for me, however, was during one of the Style Council sessions following the Conference. One of the panellists was pulled up, light-heartedly, by his fellow speakers (and several audience members, besides) for repeatedly using the word “whilst”, rather than “while”. A well-known barrister, he reasoned that he used it all the time in his legal writing, where such “antiquated” and formal style is expected, but admitted he tried to avoid it in ordinary speech and writing***.

Legal EditingWorking with legal publishers, I find I am nearly always encouraged to simplify and modernise any material that isn’t direct court**** transcript or government legislation. Capitalisation is minimised. “Whilst” and “amongst” are right out, along with any other “archaic” spelling. Most legal documents are already complex and wordy, and sometimes filled with jargon, so it seems reasonable and logical to simplify textbooks and legal commentary for an intended audience who may not be legally trained.

But I baulk at applying the same principles when it comes to fiction. Sure, “amongst” and “whilst” are not always suitable and could seem dated or clunky in, for example, a fast-paced action adventure set in the present day; but in a historical context, or in many medieval style fantasies, such wording seems wholly appropriate. If I am called on to make the choice while editing*****, sometimes I will even make allowances for speech over narration if the pattern of narration or a particular character’s speech seems appropriately – and consistently – “Olde Worlde”. And this despite a blanket rule in many style guides, and certainly in The Universe, that states such wording must cease and desist. Editorial rebellion. Are you quaking in your boots?

There is, to be sure, a fine balance between what seems appropriate and natural, and what reads as clichéd and overwritten, but these words ­­- dismissed as overly formal and antiquated – have their place in works that are themselves intended to read formally, or which depict old worlds. So long as there is no risk that the reader will be confused or disrupted from the story, the use of certain words over others – even at the expense of crisper, plainer words – can add atmosphere and rhythm to an otherwise sparse-feeling page.

So from antiquated language to jargon. Again, I fear I shall say something controversial. First, let me state up-front that I am a dedicated player of boardroom bingo*******. And I have no interest in continuing the lives of weasel words or promoting ambiguous phrasing. But I would venture to suggest that in some instances, in some industries, jargon – or industry-specific terminology – has pervaded the rest of our culture enough that it is more easily understood than the plain English equivalent.

Of course, this again varies depending on audience. If you’re writing a medical journal aimed at physicians, they will have a different grasp of language than intended readers of a general health and fitness magazine, which is different again to an advisory brochure designed for children and families. And I have said before that newspapers are apparently written for an intended audience with a reading age of eleven.

However, lately I have seen jargon-busters suggesting, for example, we do away with particular well-known medical or legal or business terms in favour of longer, simplified plain English phrasing.  The problem is… most of the time I have had trouble untangling the meaning of the plain English alternative. This is because the original terms have become familiar not just because of their industry use, but because they are used so frequently in popular culture. Film and TV courtroom dramas, police procedurals, murder mysteries, forensic thrillers, hospital soap operas, and so on all contrive to teach us new terms so that eventually it is actually easier to understand those terms than the more long-winded but simple phrasing.

I am not suggesting that plain English is a bad thing, or that we all need to add Shakespearean flourishes to every page, or particularly that we should embrace the use of jargon in our everyday lives and look to soap operas to guide all our language use. Far from it. I do think, though, that there is a time and a place for all words and styles – as long as your reader can still understand what you’re trying to say.

 

What do you think? Are you a fan of flowery phrasing? Are you a jargon junkie? Or are you an absolute minimalist when it comes to getting the message across?

 

*amongst

**awhilst – see what I did there?

***This qualifying comment meant warning cries went off every time he used “whilst” thereafter…

****Court

*****And for all I expect to lose my editing licence for claiming “amongst” is ever acceptable, this decision process occurs more often than you’d think. Those “-st”s are as common as the double-space-after-a-full-stop******…

******Just so we’re clear, that double space is entirely unnecessary. No typewriter = no double space.

*******Although generally I lose on account of giggling. My favourite real-life example of a made-up corporate word is “helicoptic lens”. No, I don’t know either.

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Genre-ly speaking

July 7th, 2011

There’s been a lot of chat about genre on the interwebs lately; in particular, people have been discussing the question of whether one should write according to genre – and according to what sells both to readers and to publishers in the first place – or whether it’s okay to write what you want and hold firm to the belief that someone somewhere will recognise the deep-seated brilliance of your creation, genre (and markets) be damned.

This seems a rather multi-layered question and there are so many different answers and aspects to consider.

Genre is confusing

Genre often means more inside the industry than out. Even passionate readers may only be aware of some of the broader categories and this can cause problems, particularly in areas such as speculative fiction, which most readers I speak to think of as “science fiction and fantasy” – assuming they have even heard the alternative term at all.* There is an understanding among readers that the “science fiction and fantasy” section of a bookshop will also include horror, all the vampire and werewolf fiction they desire, urban and paranormal fantasy, supernatural fiction, and anything else that seems a bit “otherworldly”.
That said, there can be confusion over books that, due to their themes or certain narrative devices, fall neatly under “speculative fiction” and thus find themselves duly shelved with other, more obviously fantastical or science fictional titles. This categorisation may not work well for readers who don’t quite know how to relate to what seems to be, for example, a straight-up detective novel with subtle supernatural elements.

It’s hard to know whether this is a problem of marketing or categorisation. Would such a title do better in general fiction? Would the author be better advised not to write the book at all or to adjust the writing to fit genre conventions? This last seems a great disservice to the original story, but what’s more important – the creation or the success? Are there similar problems in the crime genre which also has various subsets?

When contemplating genre, it’s important to consider who you think will be your main readers – but keep in mind you can’t actually control your audience. For example, YA, or young adult, fiction seems to be growing in popularity, but the definitions of “young adult” differ slightly from country to country (and possibly publisher to publisher). Depending on the title, it’s generally accepted that it’s not just “young adults” but also actual adults who will read YA, as well as children, depending on the book. I recently heard an industry expert say that not only does the Australian publishing industry not call this genre “YA”,** but also that he thought it was really sad that so many grown women (in particular) were reading – and becoming obsessed by – YA novels such as Twilight and other popular series because they were intended for children and he felt they should be kept that way.***

This seems like the voice of someone who would certainly like to keep distinct lines between genres, at least when it comes to distinguishing between adult and children’s titles, but honestly it just doesn’t always seem that clear-cut. I have worked on a number of titles for adults that have later been described in reviews as “young adult novels” – to the author’s surprise and, if the cover labelling is anything to go by, presumably the publisher’s as well.

***

So how do you decide what to write, genre-wise, if you already have a plot and a story in mind? And how does this relate to the common writing advice that’s already bandied about?

Write what you know

This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be an expert, but surely the genre, and indeed the subject matter, should be something you care about and are interested in?****
Writing is not a quick process and it is certainly not a get-rich-quick career. Why would you saddle yourself with a genre and style in which you have no interest? It would be immeasurably hard to write such a thing as well as something you were passionate about and, assuming you were successful, any publisher would be likely to require you to continue to write in that genre, at least initially – thus you would effectively have written yourself into a corner.

Assuming results in donkeys

Or something. There are certainly some clear-cut lines with genre, but there are also books that have crossed those boundaries. If you make assumptions about the publisher or the market and deliberately rework your ideal book to fit more comfortably into an established genre, you are denying the publisher (and your readers) an opportunity to see beyond that. Sometimes categorising isn’t obvious and sometimes publishers slip genre titles into general fiction or even (shhh) literary fiction. The Time Traveller’s Wife, for example, is a successful novel that has been slotted into “general fiction” in most bookshops, but given the time travel elements is certainly speculative fiction, despite the romance within. Sir Terry Pratchett, on the other hand, often says in interviews that he was under the impression that he was simply writing satire until being categorised as a fantasy writer. Elizabeth George is an established crime writer, but it’s the romantic back story of her characters that gets her readers most up-in-arms.

Trying to adhere too neatly to genre conventions in order to fit can be a mistake. Readers will see straight through it if you aren’t genuine, and it’s important to remember that there’s a reason other books have so easily crossed genre or slipped into “general” or even literary fiction. Russell Davies talks about this in A Writer’s Tale, pointing out that even his comedies have tragic or sad moments and vice versa. His suggestion is that this is what life is like – if the audience is to believe the story, you have to add a dose of reality and that means not being all one thing all the time. This applies to any story if you want it to stop falling flat. It’s where the secondary and tertiary storylines can come in so handily: the romance back story in the crime novel, the tragic spy thriller set in the fantasy novel etc can add depth to a tale that might otherwise feel too two-dimensional if forced to sit wholely trapped within a single convention.

Note, though, that all this still has to be true to you as a writer, to the story you believe in, or it will ring hollow and the reader – not to mention the sharp-eyed editor – will find you out. Genre is about much more than making sure you follow a few conventions. You have build it from the ground up. It will be reflected in the language you use, the world that you build, the characters you choose and their motivations, the plot itself and the interactions between the characters. It will be there in the rules you follow and it will be evident in the rules and conventions you break, the things you don’t show. While it’s true that some genres sell better than others, in the end it comes down to story. A good story told well will always sell better than a humdrum tale told half-heartedly.

What do you think? Should writers “write to fit” or just let the story flow as it will?

There has already been some discussion on this here: Kylie Mason: In Which I use the Words Genre and Convention (following the first Genre Cage Fight at Shearer’s) and here:  Zena Shapter: Should Genre Mean Something Special to You Or Not?

 

*Mostly they haven’t. Hands up those of you in the industry who have heard the old “but all fiction is speculative” line more than five times?

**Which may be news to the authors, editors and publishers I see online regularly discussing the genre using that term.

***Admittedly, said expert visibly cringed when discussing the wave of YA vampire fiction that was in the New York Times bestsellers list at the time and said he didn’t understand any of it, so perhaps not the most unbiased of opinions on that front…

****At this point I find it comforting, salient and, frankly, amusing to turn to Mitchell and Webb to illustrate this point with their series of screenwriter sketches, including this one which proves that you really will do better if you know and care about, for example, spy drama, rather than just making up what you think is required to fit the genre: Mitchell and Webb – Spy Service 


 

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On how hiring an editor is just like hiring any tradesperson

June 22nd, 2011

There are many ways to go about hiring a freelance editor to help you with your fledgling manuscript or document. You can trawl through the Yellow Pages, check Google, contact your local Writers’ Centres or dip into the directories of numerous Societies of Editors.

Just as there are hundreds of tradespeople to choose from, so there are hundreds of editors. So you narrow it down. You look for editors who specialise in your subject area. Maybe you take advice from fellow writers, get recommendations.

Finally, you have a list of people who you think would suit your manuscript. So what next?

When you contact a freelance editor and ask about hiring them to go over your work, often they’ll ask to see a sample of your manuscript before they’ll give you a quote for the cost and time it will take to complete the job.

Sounds pretty straightforward, yes? Yet for some reason this process can cause confusion and heartache, and possibly this is because writing is such a personal and creative endeavour. It’s (understandably) hard to suppress the need to impress and the fear of rejection.

The thing is, hiring an editor is really no different to hiring any tradesperson to work for you.* Most people understand that if they want to hire, for example, a plumber, to come and do a specific job, they will need to give them details of the work required in order to get an accurate quote.**

Imagine that you have a house with two bathrooms. One has recently been completely refurbished and just has a leaky tap that still needs repair. The other is completely run-down – all the tiles need replacing, there’s damp and mould. All the fixtures and fittings need replacing. In short, it’s a mess. You track down a tradesman with the right skills to do the job and tell him you have work for him. He agrees to come over to quote. You’re a bit embarrassed by the state of the old bathroom, so you just show him the leaky tap in the impressive new bathroom. He duly quotes for the work. You agree to the terms and he comes back the following week – at which point you show him into the old bathroom…

There is confusion. This is not the work he quoted for. This isn’t even the same job. This work will take much longer. It will cost more. It requires different tools. Both parties become equally frustrated.

This sounds like a ludicrous scenario.

But if you want to hire an editor to work on your manuscript, the principle is the same.

When an editor asks for a sample of your manuscript, they are asking because they need to know exactly what will be involved in working on this text.

By looking at sample pages, the editor can advise you as to what is necessary to bring the manuscript up to the standard you require.*** They can see for themselves whether the job will require a few hours simply correcting minor typing errors, or several weeks reworking awkward sentence construction and providing detailed feedback on better story structure. Often, what a writer describes as “a light proofread” can turn out to be “a heavy copy edit” if the author is hoping this will ultimately be a publishable or submittable work. It’s much better to know this up-front, when asking for the quote, rather than finding out once work has started.

When you’re considering which pages to send to the editor, then, it’s important to keep in mind why they are asking for the sample in the first place:

It’s not because they are short of reading material – they don’t need the whole manuscript at this point, and it’s unlikely that they need all the back story.  The editor won’t be reading for enjoyment or to get a feel for the story at this stage, they just need to see what work and time is involved in the edit.

It’s not because they want to see how well you can write. At least, not the way you might be thinking. You are potentially hiring this editor to work for you, not the other way around. Although they will be giving you feedback at the end of the edit, it should be honest feedback that you have asked for. Remember, this is not someone who is going to offer you a publishing contract. This is not part of a submission process. This is not about impressing anyone.
Sending through the five shiniest pages you have worked on solidly with a writing group may well prove to the editor that you have talent, but it won’t help with the quote if the other 450 manuscript pages turn out to be littered with disjointed dialogue, poor spelling and faulty grammar. It is in both your interests and the editor’s to send an “honest” sample so that you can get a proper quote.

As a writer, you will be understandably protective of your work. Editors know that you want to make sure that the person who will be working on your words really “gets” it. We know how important it is to you that we grasp every nuance. But these are concerns for the editing stage, not the quoting stage, even if it is tempting to add a few more chapters to the sample, and to send only the cleanest and best pages through. The finer details of the story don’t come into the calculations as to how many hours it’s going to take to correct all the punctuation and grammar, or whether it is likely to need a structural edit rather than a proofread.

Once you have the quote in hand, you can decide whether or not it suits your purpose. If this is your first time hiring an editor, make sure you’re really ready and keep in mind what that quote was for. That might sound stupid, but the perfectionist tendencies that see writers send in their most polished pages for a quote are the same ones that result in major rewrites post-quote. In theory there is nothing wrong with this, of course, except that an editor who has quoted for a 50,000 word manuscript will be just as surprised on receipt of a 150,000 novel as a tradesman would be on discovering that a bathroom refit suddenly also includes a kitchen refurbishment.****

What do you think? Does the quoting process send you quivering into a quandary over the perfect sample pages? Are you an editor? What are your tips? Do you drink tea, and if so, what’s your favourite?

 

*Editors probably work a little more quietly but they likely consume just as much tea. If not more.

**I know. You’re all just aching to tell me your home renovation/tradie horror stories. That is an entirely different blog topic. I shall not be moved. This is my metaphor, which is full of sunshine and happiness, tradesperson-wise.

***This is actually another important point – what sort of standard does the document need to be? Do you just want to get it to the next draft? Is it to be used in-house? Does it need to be publishable? Submission-level? Do you want to learn from the edit? This affects how the editor approaches the job as much as the style of edit.

**** In editing, this is an extremely common phenomenon. I didn’t even have to exaggerate the word count. I’m not sure how common the home renovation scenario is, to be fair, but I am not sure I have ever received a manuscript that hasn’t been worked on “just a bit” between quoting and start of editing.


 

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Best Australian Blogs 2011

May 6th, 2011

I first started this blog back in January this year after finding myself repeating the same comments about wording and structure in numerous manuscript assessments and reports. At the same time, I realised I was getting identical editing questions from nervous authors who were understandably worried about handing over their precious manuscripts for the first time.
Outside work I found I was having conversations with people trying to start editing careers who were having to dig to find all the information they needed about the industry – just as I had had to when I was starting out. Although there is a lot of information about writing and publishing available, it seems the editorial process can be a mystery for those who have not yet gone through it. Sometimes it seems it’s a mystery even for those who work regularly with editors!

I genuinely love working with authors and new editors – it’s no secret that writing and words are my passion* ­– but I found I was spending a lot of extra time putting together advice and information in separate emails instead of actually editing. Plus, I had pages and pages of spare notes that hadn’t made it into editorial reports for varying reasons – all that time and energy spent explaining different writing problems for nothing.

Originally, I had thought I’d just put a FAQ up on my static website, but those notes kept growing with every editing project – more than would make sense for a question and answer page on a business site. Once I’d decided on a blog, I realised I could also explore some other areas of writing and editing – there are lots of writer blogs, I thought it would be interesting to show what it’s like to work with writers and words from the other side.

I’m not usually one to enter competitions, but when I saw the Best Australian Blogs competition advertised, I thought I should probably enter Bothersome Words – not because I expected the blog to win, but because everyone knows it’s very hard to get a blog up and running and most of them fail within the first year. The competition, I thought, would be a good way to get the blog “out there” – and it was all about promoting good writing, which is something very close to my heart.

Writing is scary business. I have always respected any writer for having the courage to hand over their work to someone else to read**, never mind actually allowing it to be published and sent into the world at large. I get nervous enough just hitting “publish” on a simple blog post, knowing that it will slip out into the ether to be read and judged (or not read at all – is that worse?) by the denizens of the interwebs.

I was absolutely astounded when the 23 competition finalists were announced and I was notified that Bothersome Words had made it as one of the five in the Words category. I have been deeply touched by all the lovely messages of support from friends and family on- and offline. And delighted and amazed to announce that today Bothersome Words won the Words Category in the Best Australian Blogs 2011 competition.

Thank you so much to the judges, particularly the Words judge, Angela Myer, and to the Sydney Writers’ Centre. Congratulations to all the other winners:

Business and Best Blog: Styling You – Nikki Parkinson
Lifestyle/ Personal: Random Ramblings of a Stay at Home Mum – Lori Dwyer
Commentary:  News with Nipples – Kim Powell
People’s Choice: Bike Exif – Chris Hunter and, of course, all the finalists and nominees.

Here’s to celebrating writing, in every category!

 

* No, seriously, allow me to bore you some time.

** Or edit. Really, we editors DO know how terrifying our pencils/red pens/post-it notes/track changes are.

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If you want to be an editor, use your imagination

April 22nd, 2011

Mandy Brett wrote a fabulous article recently about editing and the invisibility thereof (Stet by Me: Thoughts on Editing Fiction) It got me thinking as to how editors view the art and act of editing and, further, how others view editing as a profession. I don’t mean in terms of its value, so much as the very bones and passion of it.

Writers often bemoan the fact that their lives and careers are looked upon in such “romantic” terms – those outside the industry tend to assume all writers are either tortured, starving and misunderstood* or impossibly rich and lurking in Hollywood mansions, dashing off film scripts. Either way, authors are usually objects of intrigue because they are creative – “professional daydreamers”.

Editors do not have this problem. Career-wise, they are generally regarded as boring and most assuredly not creative. No one wants to hear what an editor spent the day doing (although some writers might argue that no one really wants to hear what they actually spent the day doing, either – it’s the fantasy that’s appealing**). However, it’s the difference, or perhaps the similarities, between the two vocations, to which I wish to draw attention.

Non-writers always ask editors, “Don’t you want to write?” – the assumption being that surely one must be bored doing all those tedious corrections and desperate to do something less dull and more creative. Something with a purpose.

Writers, by contrast, tend to couch the question more tentatively and their phrasing will depend on their own experience and how their current manuscript is going: “Do you write at all?” they might ask, cautiously. Or more caustically, “Oh, God, you don’t write as well, do you?”****

The thing is, both editors and writers are drawn to their careers for the same reason – an absolute love and passion for words and stories; and for fiction writers/editors, the thrill of imaginary worlds. While the skills of each are quite different – writers are, of course, the creators; editors merely step in when the words (worlds?) are already on the page – I think there are fundamental similarities at the heart of both.

At least, there are for me.

I have yet to read anything written by an author or writer about the experience of writing or being a writer that doesn’t in some way mirror my own feelings about being an editor. In particular, I have just begun reading The Writer’s Tale by Russell T. Davies. While I haven’t yet finished the book, it’s a fascinating and completely raw look at what goes on inside the writer’s mind as he goes through the writing process – not just as he writes, but as he considers each new idea and mulls things over. The doubt, the exhilaration. Every aspect is laid bare. This particular quote struck me at the beginning:

“Writing’s inside your head! It’s thinking! It’s every hour of the day, every day of your life, a constant storm of pictures and voices and sometimes, if you’re very lucky, insight.”

It occured to me that people speak this way about writing (so passionate!), but never about editing.

Editing is regarded as the “clean-up” – it’s mechanical, drudge-work, and has been given an aura almost of soullessness, suggesting a lack of creativity or imagination involved in the process.

But is this a true reflection?

Editing is not just about correcting errors. I know many are quick to point out that an editor’s role is to read and amend a manuscript objectively and calculatingly. Indeed, they say, the editor’s greatest skill is their ability to survey the work with a scrutiny and distance the author could never be expected to achieve. And yet the vocation itself is not cold and calculating and I find that I shy away from being associated with such distant terms. I don’t know any editors that don’t live and breathe words as surely as the writers they work with so closely.

Do we use them and filter them in different ways? Perhaps.
I can’t, however, think of a time during which my mind is ever switched “off” from its natural storytelling state. There is always part of my mind experiencing anything, everything, in the world as that “storm” of words and stories. There is always a disembodied narrator putting things down for me on mental paper – rewording, rephrasing: editing, if you like. As Davies says – it’s every hour of every day; it’s constant… and sometimes it brings insight to a piece I am editing, or to a piece I will edit.

And, it seems to me, it is very similar to the way in which so many writers say they experience the world.

Many writers note the way they get lost in fictional worlds; the way characters – born entirely of their own imaginations – become as real to them as anyone with whom they actually share a house. They may write blog posts confessing that interactions with friends and family, or even strangers, are likely to end up as thinly veiled passages in future books.

While an editor might not be prey to the Muse in the same way as a writer, the above is not unfamiliar. An editor becomes so involved with the books they work on that they too begin to know the characters nearly as well as the original author. They have to, for how else might they deduce any errors in characters’ behaviour or inconsistencies in plot?

Once trained to analyse texts and manuscripts and re-imagine characters and structures fitting together in different ways, it’s not so far-fetched to think that editors, like writers, might also mentally rework their next meal as a scene in a book – even if they don’t then sit down to type it up.
Where a writer might use such a scene as inspiration for their own new creations, an editor might similarly mentally catalogue the scene and use the same kind of creative process to help the authors they work with to develop their existing stories and improve their writing. It becomes a real-world example for the editor to draw on: “this is how dialogue should flow”, “this is how a family scene might be”.

Editors need to develop their powers of observation and a certain amount of creativity and writing prowess in the same way that writers do. Editing is not, in fact, all drudgery and red pen, and checking dictionaries and “just being pedantic”.

My own “about” page here says: “I spent most of my childhood buried inside my imagination and now spend most of my time mucking about inside other people’s as a freelance editor…” and for me this is key to my ability to edit. Because if I don’t allow my own imagination free rein, then how can I guide anyone else? How can I presume to offer suggestions and amendments beyond the prescriptive offerings of the grammar rulebooks and dictionaries if I haven’t explored my own imagination and spent a good deal of time learning the art of daydreaming?

I am not suggesting for a moment that what an editor does is by any means the same thing as what a writer does. Of course writers are the ones who create the works that we merely step into. Nor am I suggesting that editors ought to be treated as tortured artists.
But I do think it’s important to remember that editing has a creative side – and it’s okay to admit to that.

What do you think? Is editing a creative process for you? (Or do I just have voices in my head?)

 

* Possibly this IS true.

** Undoubtedly, writers can make “spent 8 hours staring at the computer screen and procrastinating” sound a lot more exciting than it genuinely is. Nevertheless…***

*** Hypothesis re: procrastination based on twitter comments and blog posts from eleventy billion authors worldwide. Full-time, part-time, published and unpublished.

**** There are just so many ways to take this question. And yes, I have heard every one of these iterations. More than once. In more than one tone.


 

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Are you ready for an editor?

April 13th, 2011

The other day someone asked what I was working on and then expressed surprise when I said it was the same manuscript they had asked about previously. They felt I had been working on it for a “long time” – in fact this particular tome was on a very tight deadline and needed to be completed far more quickly than usual. This, however, is not an unusual reaction from someone outside the profession – as far as they can tell, we editors just read for a living and how long, really, does it take to read a couple of pages?

When you come to an editor for a professional edit, they are not just reading your words. They are considering each word, each punctuation mark, and the context and flow of each; separately, in combination, and in the manuscript as a whole. They will go through your manuscript more than once.

If you are a new author, many editors will also endeavour to provide you the tools with which to learn so the process becomes easier and less complex for you as time goes on. Most first drafts, particularly of first-ever novels, require a lot of work and a lot of time, but new writers, seeking to get published, don’t always know what they’re getting into when they finished their first manuscript and start looking for help to “clean it up, ready for a publisher”.

Most people who decide they want to become authors pick up on one piece of advice pretty quickly. They know that if they want to achieve their dream of becoming published, they need to write.

However, further down the track when that first novel draft is completed, things are not always so clear. Not everyone is surrounded by fellow writers, or knows what next step they need to take. Many people know only that once they have written their manuscript they need to get it to a publisher and, having looked about a little (online, or perhaps browsing the “how to get published” section of a bookshop or library), they realise they probably need to have that manuscript edited first.

This blog post is about how there is much more to it than that.

Because so often freelance editors get emails from people asking for quotes to edit the first draft of the first manuscript they’ve ever written – sometimes the first thing they’ve written since high school.

This blog post is about why you might want to put a little more work into that manuscript first, about why you might want to spend a little more time working on your own writing and editing skills before you hire someone else.

There are plenty of authors who can tell you why you’d do this from a writing perspective. There are plenty of publishing sitesthat will tell you why to do this, too.

This post talks about it from the editing perspective.

There are a number of different ways to work with a manuscript, depending on what stage the work is up to. An editor may do a structural edit, (which will go over the “big picture” stuff, checking plot, characters, consistency and – well – overall structure, as well as identifying any major repeated errors in grammar, spelling, punctuation etc.)  a copy edit (this goes through the manuscript in detail, checking facts, consistency of plot and characters, as well as language, spelling, grammar, punctuation etc.), or just a straight proofread (this is less detailed and and usually ensures that all the spelling, grammar, punctuation and formatting is in order ready for print, but may also catch out any jarring facts or wording).
Depending on the author’s skill level and the state of the manuscript, the editor may decide to do a combination of these.
Alternatively, an editor can complete a manuscript assessment. Depending on the author’s wishes, this can be done at the start of the editing process – so the writer gets an idea of how much work is required on the novel, or at the end, so they can see if it’s actually ready for publication or submission to publishers.

An editor, as explained in previous posts, is there to help the author get the story in their head out on the page. Obviously the more experience an author has, the cleaner the manuscript is that the editor is working with, the easier this task is.

If an author shows up with a manuscript they have never even looked over, that is a much bigger task. It is not realistic to spend the time (or money) on all the things that likely require attention.

No matter how good the basic story is, if it is written entirely in a passive voice, or the dialogue is clunky, or there are constant shifts in tense or points of view; this draws attention away from plot errors, or grammar problems, or spelling mistakes. It’s highly unlikely that a writer would want to pay for the hundreds of hours it would take a professional editor to amend, correct and explain the problems in such a manuscript. So the editor has to make a choice as to what to focus on and that means other elements miss out.

It is not always clear what the author may actually want – do they just want what’s on the page cleaned up, or do they want the story to be the best it can be? Often it can seem that what the writer really wants is a mentor and this is really a separate task to editing.

 

If you’re a new writer serious about developing your skills and creating the best story you can, there are other stages you should consider before you think about engaging a freelance editor:

  • After completing that very first draft: let it sit for a while. Let your brain refresh before you go back over it yourself and check the story for issues as well as looking out for grammar and punctuation.
  • Do you have friends or family who you can trust to read over your work critically? Pass it to them and ask for feedback.
  • If mentoring is what you’re after, consider joining a writers’ group – there’s bound to be one in your city or even online. These don’t work for everyone and you have to find the right mix of people, but such groups can be invaluable. Writers’ centres often also run workshops and mentorships.

All these things can help you workshop your manuscript in ways that could be quite expensive with a professional editor. Plus, you will learn more if you work through these stages yourself, rather than paying someone else to clean up the early draft/s and supply you with a report or some notes.

And if this list looks daunting, if all this looks like too much effort, too time-consuming? You may need to reconsider why you wish to become an author. Because while it’s perfectly true that occasionally a first-draft manuscript arrives that is very clean – an amazing story, wonderfully told, that needs little help in the way of plot tightening or grammar correction, this is exceedingly rare.
Even published authors with ongoing publishing contracts and piles of bestsellers behind them work through a lot of these methods* – many of them have their own personal beta readers, take time out between drafts of their next bestseller, and they certainly go through several rounds of editing with their publisher. Why should it be any different when you’re starting out?

 

 

* Where do you think we learned about them?


 

 

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Diana Wynne Jones

March 27th, 2011

It’s a sad and reflective time in the BW hovel today, with news that the great Diana Wynne Jones has passed away.

It’s no exaggeration to say that this author changed my life, though I never met her. Certainly she changed my reading habits, for though, as a child, I had already discovered fantasy through such books as Alice in Wonderland and the Chronicles of Narnia, it was Diana Wynne Jones who really brought my love of the genre to life. My devotion to her stories was enough for me to decide at quite a young age that one day I would not only work with books, but I would work with books just like these.

Diana Wynne Jones Books

My first DWJ was Charmed Life, given to me by a book-loving relative when I was somewhere around seven or eight years old. I fell head over heels from the first page and from then on my whole family ensured I was regularly supplied with a DWJ fix. This was not always easy, particularly during the dark days when so many of her works seemed to be out of print – sometimes my habit was fuelled with ancient, second-hand copies, the covers sticky and grimy with age. But I didn’t care. Only the stories inside mattered, and those were intact.

Later there were reprints as fantasy fell back into publishing-favour, and I quickly gathered up books I hadn’t even realised were missing from my collection. That same relative who’d gifted me with my first DWJ continued sending adult-me the latest releases when she came across them.

Meanwhile I’d found a more immediate source – a friend who worked at the local arm of DWJ’s publisher occasionally provided me with advance copies.

As an adult, I reread the books and marvel at the layers – the hidden themes and meaning (often so much darker and more serious than I ever realised as a child), the different historical and mythological elements that are woven into the various tales. But reading as a child it was the simple things I adored.

Despite having no interest in science, I wanted a chemistry set like the ones in The Ogre Downstairs. And I developed a peculiar fascination with matchbooks after reading Charmed Life and Eight Days of Luke. To this day, I get a little thrill every time I find one – so much more magical and olde worlde than a matchbox.

Of course, with Diana Wynne Jones books it is the very ordinariness mixed in with the magic and quirkiness that make them so special. There is something delightful in the notion that a powerful enchanter might use plain old stainless steel in place of the “proper” silver cutlery that cripples him. Jones’s heroes are nearly all ordinary people, complete with their own flaws and foibles, and while sometimes they perform magnificent feats, nine times out of ten, it’s their ordinary strength and wit and courage and mostly common sense that sees them through outlandish and twisted circumstances; staring down the most wicked, selfish, pompous and powerful villains. And usually, the hardest thing they have to overcome is not the wild and magical danger, but the very ordinary and human traits of doubt and fear of being humiliated.

Her books are things to be treasured but, I learned, shared sparingly and cautiously. Having once given a good friend a copy of Fire and Hemlock (my own best-beloved copy deemed far too precious to leave the house) I was horrified when she casually told me she’d thought it was ‘quite good’ but ‘a bit weird’. I loved my friend a tiny bit less after that faint praise and vowed never to chance Charmed Life on anyone unless I could be certain of appropriate levels of adoration.

In the online world I have since met hundreds of the millions of DWJ devotees out there. Now I find it commonplace to see blog discussions on the merits of Howl or stranded commuters tweeting requests to Hathaway for a bus.

What a wonderful legacy she has left us with. And how sad for everyone that she has left so soon.


 

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How to build worlds

March 22nd, 2011

When it comes to setting the scene in a book, everyone will tell you the worldbuilding is important. This is true no matter what sort of book you’re writing or which genre you’re writing in.

If you’re writing a fantasy novel, of course people tend to focus more closely on the worldbuilding since it is expected that you will be inventing new, make-believe worlds with your words. But it is just as important to create a believable world if you’re writing a memoir or autobiography: you have to recreate the world of your past, bring real people and landscapes to life for today’s reader.

Similarly, even if you’re working between these two extremes, creating a fictional story set in the real world, you still need to focus on piecing the foundations together. Things need to make sense. They must be believable and consistent and well-rounded. The biggest mistake a writer can make is to assume that their own knowledge or view of things is enough to for an entire world.* We all have our blind spots and biases, and these can easily be revealed in the worldbuilding if care isn’t taken.

The devil, they say, is in the details. They can make or break the story. As the author, by presenting the reader with your words, your vision, your world, you’re asking the reader to suspend disbelief and let go of this world to enter yours (even if the story is set in this world, and even if what they’re reading is “true” rather than fiction). So, you have to give them enough information to experience that world – and you have to maintain their interest in your world throughout the story.

Add enough detail and the world you have created is brought to life. Leave too much out and the entire story can seem shallow. Lose track of even the most insignificant-seeming fact and the entire plot can fall apart. **

Worldbuilding and the speculative fiction focus has already been mentioned. The skill it takes to create these fantastical places is widely recognised by fans of the genre. These authors are not just creating a land or planet complete with landscapes and townships, but also ecosystems, cultures, politics, language, magic – entirely different states of being. Ideally, everything that makes the world run on every level has to have been thought out as it affects every character and the way they interact with each other and the plot at large. The author needs to keep hold of every strand that they’ve used to weave this world together if they are to keep the reader convinced with every page they turn.

All this attention to detail gives a sense of realism to even the most incredible of tales. If the world works, the story works. But if some of the details feel off, if the worldbuilding isn’t strong enough, the whole story can come crashing down. Unless it is a plot point, nothing is more distracting than finding a character possessing skills or achieving feats that the very rules of the invented world insist should be impossible. A reader will snap out of a story in an instant if, for example, the shapeshifter who couldn’t touch metal in the first three books of a series is unharmed by several silver bullets in the fourth because the author forgot that particular clause.

Consistency and attention to detail is just as important in less fantastical novels. Action thrillers that otherwise show extreme attention to detail when it comes to science, technology and military power can fall apart if, for example, the political scenes depicting world leaders gathering to combat the major common threat (aliens, terrorists etc.) only show the US President and his security force in action – leaving out any further mention of the other supposedly powerful “leaders”.

Such a situation suggests the author has cribbed from US-centric Hollywood movies, rather than researching how global political leaders might react to crises. It doesn’t matter how convincing the aliens are, how believable the technology, or how tightly-written the gun-fights if the scenes most easily imagined in our world are the ones that are merely sketched over. Such a contrast in the level of detail is likely to pull the reader out of the story. It suggests a lack of authority and mastery on the author’s part and the mirage can be shattered.

Research, then, can be key to ensuring that details and your own narrow knowledge base don’t let you down. But there’s more to it than merely adding and enforcing those details. It’s not just about creating a world – you have to make it believable and it has to make sense.

If your world is different to ours in some way, if it breaks the laws of nature or physics, you might do well to familiarise yourself with the consequences of such a change. How would that affect day-to-day life? Geography? Trade? Buildings and cities? Education? Politics? Family life?

If you’re writing non-fiction, think about your audience and consider whether you’re writing about something that will be different for them – are you writing about a different time? A different country? Again, how is life different in that world to this one?

It’s also worth ensuring you’re familiar with the genre in which you write, even if (or especially if) you plan to break all the perceived rules of those who have written before you. It’s worth knowing in advance if the concepts and characters you think you have invented are actually featured heavily in World of Warcraft or bear an uncanny resemblance to a well-known Celtic myth, even if it is entirely coincidental. Whether or not these similarities are acknowledged in your world are themselves  important in the building.

* Unless you’re writing a dystopia. Or utopia, depending on ego size and confidence/tendency towards tyranny…

**Of course, add too much detail and you leave no blanks for the reader’s imagination to fill in. There’s a lot to be said for hinting at information. Worldbuilding doesn’t necessarily mean giving all the facts, figures and measurements of a world or city. That way page-skipping lies.

What are your tips for worldbuilding? And have you seen any major slip-ups? What pulls you out of a writer’s world?


 


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The stigma of working in fantasy

March 4th, 2011

A lot of authors talk about the stigma attached to being a genre writer. No matter how successful a fantasy writer may be, it’s likely they have at least once been scorned by people comparing their work to that of “literary” authors. Readers too may have aspersions cast upon them if their reading choice is of the paranormal persuasion rather than something considered “high-brow”.*

Thankfully, fellow authors and readers within these genres are very supportive of each other, but it’s not unusual to hear authors admit that they don’t always tell strangers what genre they write in, or for readers to confess to hiding their book jackets when reading on the bus.

It can be a similarly lonely path for the editor who specialises in fantasy/science fiction.

When I first professed my desire to edit speculative fiction, the reaction from fellow publishing friends was lukewarm to say the least.

When I put together an ad for my freelance editing services, some people even recommended I avoid mentioning that I had specialist knowledge or interest in this area as it was likely I would scare off potential clients and publishers who might otherwise have hired me.

Several years down the track and while I enjoy editing many different forms, fields and genres, a significant proportion of my work falls into the speculative fiction category, and I am proud and excited to work with some incredible FSF authors, editors and publishers.

I am not sure whether things have changed over time, or whether the rise of social media simply means that fellow geeks, speculative fiction readers, writers, editors and publishers have all found a safe place to congregate, but I don’t feel as though I need to hide my “niche” interests.

Most of the time.

While I have, of course, found fellow editors who share my passion, generally speaking I know that if I am in a room full of editors outside certain circles, finding one who also edits fantasy is likely to be tough. Often during these gatherings, fellow freelancers tell me that they “always refuse to edit that stuff”, because they “can’t stand it”.** One person even turned her back and walked away upon discovering I edited this subject matter, such was her dislike of and disinterest in the genre – though we’d been talking happily enough about editing in general up to that point.

Most of the time, if I don’t know the person I am talking to, I know it is easier say only that I edit books; fiction, if pressed. Or mention other subjects I work on. It seems to be considered much more acceptable (or should that be respectable?) to edit literary fiction, non-fiction, or government material than anything as low-brow (or “escapist”) as speculative fiction, romance or crime.

But why is this? The basic editing skills are the same; you still have to consider style, structure, continuity, spelling, grammar, punctuation and all those other things.
In addition, with fantasy you might have to stay on top of a made-up world, which means you have to “learn” the culture/s and language that are part of the worldbuilding without any resources to check for research. You have to ensure the rules that govern the language and the world itself make sense and “work”. It makes for some very lengthy style sheets and very odd author queries.

I can understand that as an editor, if you don’t enjoy reading fantasy, you may not want to take on the task of editing it. But what I don’t understand is how an editor can look askance at the genre when it is clear how much work an author has to put in to develop and write such detailed books.

This week I was lucky enough to attend a recording of a TV special on fantasy books. It was no surprise to see a good proportion of the program devoted to the stigma attached to the writing and reading of fantasy, and the authors had some great points to make – not least about the complexities involved in writing such works and the fact that fantasy is the biggest-selling genre in fiction.

Several pointed out that fantasy is actually sneaking onto the general fiction shelves without people noticing. And there are great literary works out there that are best-beloved in spec fic circles, though scholars and critics would never categorise them that way.

Perhaps things are looking up. The last time I went to a general editors’ meeting, the wary revelation of my speculative fiction tendencies was greeted with only mild surprise and resulted in a discussion about editing fiction. Could it be the stigma is fading?

*Of course this impression is not restricted to FSF. Romance writers and readers (and presumably therefore their editors) get the same treatment. I remember a colleague once telling the office that she and a friend had decided to try and write a Mills and Boon, believing it would be very simple. They’d given up, having (unsurprisingly) found it was harder than it looked…

**I could argue that a lot of people don’t really understand what fantasy is – it’s not all dragons and wizards! But not liking FSF is fair enough. Not everyone likes crime novels either. Or romance. Or <gasp> literary fiction. (Whatever “literary fiction” means. Feel free to insert your own rant or vodcast of your interpretive dance on THAT topic in the comments…)


 

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