Knowing Your Craft and Ugly Babies

I am an editor.

Unlike the title of writer, I am confident in saying: I am an editor. I’ve been doing it for a good, solid chunk of time now.

Editors are both loved and reviled. (At least, people say they appreciate their editors.  I’ve heard some even consider their editors friends. This could be urban myth though…)

Over the past year, I’ve had some folks argue rather vehemently against the editing process. They disagree with the changes I’ve made/suggested, they don’t like having to add/remove scenes, they don’t want to lose that one, precious sentence they bled over…

Being an editor is tough work, folks. It means taking someone else’s newborn baby, cleaning it, giving it its shots, making it scream, determining if it has all its appendages and organs, and checking that they’re all in the right place.

The reason the author can’t do this? Because no one can see that their own baby is ugly.

Really. Getting the distance to see what you’ve really written versus what you think you’ve written is virtually impossible. That’s why you need someone else to do it for you. And when I say someone else, I don’t mean your mum or friend or partner.

I mean someone who is trained to do it. Someone who understands market, genre, house style, grammar, and structure. Not someone who just says, “What a great little story!” but rather someone who says, “I understand what you’re trying to do here. The thing is, it isn’t working because of x, y and z. If, however, you add an element of x to page 25, scene A, then it will help you tie these things together.”

Certain things are negotiable in editing–word choice, to some extent, and the general structure. But if your character does something that they wouldn’t normally do, and it’s not intentional on the author’s part (i.e. it’s not a growth/change moment) then something needs to be done about that. If your character is using words a character like that wouldn’t use (i.e. is a plumber going to use four syllable words on a regular basis?) perhaps that’s the character you’ve built. But if they just happen to use one, when as a rule they don’t, then that’s out of character and should be analysed.

The point of editing is to make your work the best it can possibly be. If you believe, to the depths of your soul, that ONLY you can tell this story and not a single change made my someone else is warranted, then let me tell you something: you’re in the wrong profession, folks. As a colleague of mine says, “Editing is not a democracy. It can be a discussion, but it’s not a democracy.” (This is true when it comes to house style, specifically  and not when you’ve hired a freelance).

EVERY WRITER needs a good editor. I mean that to the combined dictionary-thesaurus depths of my being. And you must be willing to admit that maybe you DON’T know everything about the craft of writing. Because it is a craft. It’s work, and you learn and learn and learn. You are not always right. (Neither is your editor, incidentally. They can be wrong too.) I am an editor–but when I’ve got my writing hat on, I need an editor. I miss things in my own writing all the time I fix in author’s manuscripts. Because it’s a different hat, a different point of view. And I trust whoever is editing me to pick up the issues I’ve left like breadcrumbs and erase the editorial voice on the path all together.

Trust.

That’s the absolute foundation of a relationship with your editor. You must trust them to be trained in what they’re doing, to know the house style (which is not negotiable, folks. House style is part of a publisher’s brand, and those rules are meant for every author under the brand’s umbrella), to understand the elements of the genre and to implement them well, without stepping on your voice. When you argue things like dialogue tags and comma splices, you’re not trusting them to know what they’re talking about.

No one likes to be told their baby isn’t utterly perfect the moment its born. But with a bit of magic performed by the right people, that baby can be perfect by the time other people cradle it in their arms. It might not be exactly what you pictured it would be, but when it grows up, what baby is?

Come Write with Me

There’s still time to register for my course, Editing Your Prose.

It starts on January 14th and is six weeks–every Monday night at the Nottingham Writer’s Studio.

I’d love to have you there. I’ve pasted the course details below. To register, go to http://www.nottinghamwritersstudio.co.uk.

 

Editing Your Prose with Victoria Oldham

14 January – 18 February (6 weeks)

Victoria is back with her much praised Editing Your Prose course. So many people were asking about it we decided to run it again! See what past participants have said:

“I was a bit stuck on what type of editing the second draft of my novel needed – now I’m not.”

“It more than met my expectations – covering material I hadn’t thought about – despite my own professional editing experience. [...] I now understand things I’ve been told before, that didn’t entirely make sense. It’s improved my planning process almost beyond recognition.”

The Course

The first course of action when writing is to write. To get your ideas down in, at least theoretically, a cohesive and plausible way. But when you’re done with that, it’s time to give your work some tough love. This six-week editing course will go over various aspects of self-editing, including point of view, structural gaps and how to fill them, word choice, dialogue and basic editing tips on both line and structural levels. You will be working on your own manuscript, and the instructor will use examples from everyone’s work in order to show, not tell.

The Tutor

Victoria Oldham is a professional editor with a publishing house in New York, and has published more than sixty articles and short stories.

Cost: £48 full price, £36 NWS members
Dates: Mondays, weekly, from 14 January to 18 February 2013, 7–9pm
Where: the NWS meeting room.
To book: Contact us on admin@nottinghamwritersstudio.co.uk.

 

Writing vs Editing

I write, and I edit. 

Officially, I am an editor. I write, but not enough to feel like a career writer. I am, however, a career editor.

I’ve been asked which is harder, and which I prefer.

The thing is, they’re utterly, totally different things.

Writing is flowy. It’s creative, and open, and you can do whatever you want with whomever you want in whatever setting you want. A vampire riding around in a flying car in 3020? Sure. And I write, well, dirty stuff.

I was at a conference with S, and we met some great folks. One of them asked me if I’d submit a story to an upcoming anthology. I laughed and said, why not? And then I threw S under the bus and said she’d write something too. We did, and were both published in said anthology.

From that time, I’ve had eight more published. They’re flowy, and sexy, and dirty, and quick. Nothing deep, no subtext. Raw and messy. Not one of them took more than an hour or two to write. I continue to watch for calls for submissions, but they seem to have faded for the moment.

Editing, on the other hand, is not flowy. It is not, generally, creative, nor open, and there are lots and lots of rules. It requires absolute concentration, dedication, and you have to go, line by line, through a story and see both what is not there as well as what is. You have to see plot gaps, character inconsistencies, structural and pacing issues, dangling participles, incorrect modifiers, etc.

I find that when I need to write, I have to have a certain amount of distance from my editing space. Literally. I sometimes need to write in a place separate from my editing space to create space in my head, making room for flowy instead of editorial.

The more I edit, the less I write. The clearer I am while editing, the more difficult I find writing. This is particularly problematic since I’m doing a PhD in creative writing…

Ultimately, I have decided to set aside days just for creative writing. Whole days where I edit nothing, where I ignore my own authorial foibles and just let the words vomit from my fingertips. I don’t even edit them before I send them to my editorial committee, because I’m afraid I’ll take the passion out of it and leave nothing but grammatical lethargy.

So. That’s my story. What’s yours?

Book: The Woman Who Killed Babies for Money

Song: We’ll be Coming Back by Calvin Harris

Blog:  Global Words 1 Editing and Literacy Consultancy (shameless self promotion)

 

Come Write with Me! Workshop: Editing Your Prose

If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile, you know that I write a fair amount. I blog, I write articles, I write short stories, etc.

What you may not know is that I also edit. I’m a development editor: I take on manuscripts for the publishing house that stand out in some way, but are still in the potential stage, meaning there’s something promising, but it isn’t actually ready for publication yet.

So the author and I work through these manuscripts piece by piece, looking at various aspects of craft. It’s a learning process, and it’s not an easy one. But by the end, the author has learned loads, and can apply that knowledge to their next manuscript.

I’m telling you this because I’m going to be leading a writing workshop at the Nottingham Writer’s Studio. Editing Your Prose (June 13-July 18, Weds nights at 7pm) is for folks who have a manuscript/story, but are having difficulty self-editing. Over the six-week course, we’ll be going through various aspects of editing, including point of view, structural gaps and dialogue issues.

You have to have a piece of work to play with, and it’s an in-person class, not an on-line class. (If there’s enough interest, I may run an on-line class later in the year).

But if you’d like to join (and I really, really hope you will!) contact admin@nottinghamwritersstudio.co.uk or call 0115 959 7947.

Hope to see you there!

Rub It On Your Soul

Image by milo tobin via Flickr

The thing with writing is that it’s hard.

Hard.

Getting your words down on paper isn’t the bitch of it. It’s getting them down right, so they flow and wander and meander in exactly the right way. It’s making them clear, and using just the right amount of words to tantalize and describe and summon and contain.

It’s creating words that create a sentence that create a paragraph that create a story you want to roll around in, get dirty with, sink your teeth into and rub all over your soul.

The point of writing isn’t just to write, but to write beautifully.

Like I said. Hard.

And editing is similar. Do you let the author keep that long, lovely sentence that doesn’t add anything to the manuscript? Or do you ruthlessly cut it and tell the author to keep it for another manuscript? Do you switch the words around sentence by sentence, so that it’s not only grammatically correct but ‘sounds’ better? What if that changes something subtle about their own unique voice?

The last thing you want to do as an editor is pop the dream of a writer like a water balloon filled with cat sick.

But at the same time it’s your job to make sure that the baby they’ve given creative birth to is cleaned up, breathing well, and has all it’s limbs. And sometimes that means cutting off the extra nipple or toe.

So to speak.

Right now I’m reading When God Was A Rabbit. If you havent read it, and you want to write beautiful, gorgeous, amazing metaphor and simile, that’s the book you should read to learn it.

And if you have read it, I’d love to hear what you thought of it. I’m in love with it. Seriously. I want to bathe in its beauty and come out sticky with metaphor candy.

But at the moment I have to go edit someone’s baby’s extremities.

Hand me that rubber glove, would you?

Book: When God Was A Rabbit by Sarah Winman

Song: Please Dont Let Me Go by Olly Murs