Writer, Editor, Helper

You Want Me to What? Reading the Work of Friends

At her excellent blog, Love, Your Copyeditor, Ray Gunn recently wrote about the cons and pros (in that order) of having writer friends who need copyediting. Feeling the same way she does, I have made fun of this predicament. But Ms. Gunn’s more serious treatment reminded me of a related issue, which is that because I do what I do, I have a lot of writer friends. And they often ask me to read their work without my copyeditor’s hat on.

I’ve read drafts of a play, a screenplay, novels, children’s books, blog posts, short stories—all with pleasure and admiration. Typically, there are at least a few ways in which I can query or nudge or misunderstand enough to provoke some rethinking. The challenge of approaching a work at a level that copyediting discourages, the big-picture level, is fun for a change.

And what a luxury, to sail past inconsistent spellings, iffy punctuation, and inattention to Chicago style. Unlike many copyeditors, I can take off that hat and it pretty much stays off. (You won’t hear me brag that I can’t read past a typo. I’m more likely to be flummoxed when a friend writes me to correct her previous e-mail, not having noticed the typo in the first place.)

So, friends, please don’t ask me to copyedit your work.* The answer will always be no. But keep your stories coming.

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*You understand that this has nothing to do with your lifelong right to e-mail me for copyediting advice in exchange for your own expertise—be it legal, medical, culinary, computer tech, home repair. . . . In that regard, I’m pretty sure I’ll always be in your debt.

A Little Holiday Advice for Copyeditors

Over the next few days, let’s all take extra care to

— spend some time away from the computer,
— limit the eggnog consumption, and
— proofread the wrapping paper!


Happy Holidays!
Carol

The Freelancer’s Dilemma: When an Estimate Is Low

Have you ever been partway into a freelance editing job only to find that it’s going to take a lot longer than you (or the assigning editor) thought? Maybe the tables are full of math errors, or the writing requires a lot of time-consuming head scratching and minor rewriting.

If you exceed the estimated time, will the client think you’re exaggerating the problems to inflate the bill? Will they think you don’t know how to work efficiently? Which should you do: bill for the originally estimated time and take a loss, or bill for the extra time and risk alienating the client?

I’m guessing that freelancers more often cheat themselves than cheat their clients. But neither is a good solution. Instead, I recommend “working to rule.”

Experienced assigning editors know that there are two kinds of projects: (1) the kind that deserves just about exactly the estimated number of hours, and (2) the kind that takes however long it takes. The problem is, how do you know which kind you’re doing, and if it’s type 1, how do you “work to rule”?

Whether you’re working for a flat fee or by the hour, you can try to get a sense of a project’s importance by asking the assigning editor whether it’s okay if it takes longer than estimated. Pay close attention to her response. Not that she’ll come right out and give you permission to cut corners. Rather, she’ll let you know if the opposite is true: that it’s the kind of project that requires your best effort, regardless of cost. She’ll also know whether the schedule can be stretched.

If it turns out that you’re expected to match the estimate, that’s what you should do. Working to a specified number of hours takes experience. Learn to monitor your progress and make adjustments: Fact-check less (if it’s not what you were hired to do). Identify tasks that you can automate. Make a decision to live with idiosyncratic styles if they are logical and consistent.

I can hear you protesting, “No! We can’t lower our standards!” But let’s be reasonable. Some of our “standards” are just time-consuming habits that don’t really make a difference to the reader. Letting go of them gives us time for more important tasks—and if working for our employers means working to a schedule, working for the reader means using the time we have in the best ways possible. Besides, the manuscript doesn’t have to be perfect.

Shocked? Don’t be. The manuscript does not have to be perfect because perfect isn’t possible. As I say in The Subversive Copy Editor, there’s no Platonic ideal for that document, one “correct” way for it to turn out, one perfect version hidden in the block of marble that it’s your job to discover by endless chipping away. It simply has to be the best you can make it in the time you’re given, free of true errors, rendered consistent in every way that the reader needs in order to understand and appreciate, and as close to your chosen style as is practical.

You can fiddle with a text forever, but a client will only pay so much. Working to rule—with the reader in mind—is the best solution.

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Image of woman pouring coins from wallet by Marco Verch via Creative Commons 2.0. 

The Iliad on an e-Reader?Oh, the Humanity!

For the last month I’ve been copyediting a second edition of Richmond Lattimore’s translation of Homer’s Iliad. War and battles and great hulking gods and heroes—but I’m struck too by its delicacy and pathos. For instance, the warrior Hektor with his family (6.466–74):

So speaking glorious Hektor held out his arms to his baby,
who shrank back to his fair-girdled nurse’s bosom
screaming, and frightened at the aspect of his own father,
terrified as he saw the bronze and the crest with its horse-hair,
nodding dreadfully, as he thought, from the peak of the helmet.
Then his beloved father laughed out, and his honored mother,
and at once glorious Hektor lifted from his head the helmet
and laid it in all its shining upon the ground. Then taking
up his dear son he tossed him about in his arms, and kissed him.

Or Gorgythion dying in battle, an arrow in his chest (8.306–8):

He bent drooping his head to one side, as a garden poppy
bends beneath the weight of its yield and the rains of springtime;
so his head bent slack to one side beneath the helm’s weight.

I don’t know about you, but I continue to hear grousing that digital delivery removes the “humanity” from writing. Nearly three thousand years ago, when the Iliad was first written down after being preserved for generations by vocal performance alone, no doubt many wondered how the silent markings could possibly convey the same effect. I might have been among them.

The transition of the Iliad and the Odyssey to digital form for e-readers is trivial in comparison. To those who can find no humanity on their screens, all I can say is, look within.

 

Making Sense of Style

Not all style conventions make sense at first glance. Or second. Or ever. For instance, who thought up the idea of putting periods and commas inside the quotation marks whether or not they are part of a quotation?

Other rules that have a stated logic are based on distinctions so subtle or tenuous you suspect that someone is just messing with you: Washington State, but state of Washington? Swiss Gruyère, but swiss cheese?

It’s not surprising that writers sometimes feel like chucking the style book into the recycling. But understanding the reasoning behind a convention is an excellent antidote to frustration, and today I’m going to tackle an important one that continues to flummox writers: that is, why note and bibliography entries have different styles, and why that makes sense. We’ll use Chicago style, since that’s what I know.

Note style:

Mack Maccio, Zamboni Repair in the Home (Chicago: Bizbooks, 2002).

Bibliography style:

Maccio, Mack. Zamboni Repair in the Home. Chicago: Bizbooks, 2002.

Why the difference? To begin with, notes are usually written like sentences, so putting the first name first is natural reading order. Since periods signal the end of a sentence, they would be confusing in the middle of a note citation. Instead, the elements are separated by commas and parentheses. Try it: read the following note the way you would any sentence.

23. For more on getting rich quick, see Mack Maccio, Zamboni Repair in the Home (Chicago: Bizbooks, 2002), 42–56; and Dora Gump, Effie Thompson, and Clara Stubee, Counting Your Way to Blackjack Bucks (Las Vegas: HustlePub, 2009), xii.

On the other hand, when you go to a bibliography, you expect to scan a list in alphabetical order. Putting the names in natural order would make that awkward. Instead, names appear as they would in an index, with the last name first. In a list it’s clear where a citation begins and ends, so periods may be used to separate the elements.

Bibliography style:

Gump, Dora, et al. Counting Your Way to Blackjack Bucks. Las Vegas: HustlePub, 2009.

Maccio, Mack. Zamboni Repair in Your Home. Chicago: Bizbooks, 2002.

In another method of citing called the author-date system, the forms also make sense. In the text, works are cited concisely by (what else?) author and date (Maccio 2002), leaving the reader to find the full citation in a reference list at the end of the article or book. Maccio 2002 is easier to find if the dates are moved to the front.

Reference list style:

Gump, Dora, et al. 2009. Counting Your Way to Blackjack Bucks. Las Vegas: HustlePub.

Maccio, Mack. 2002. Zamboni Repair in Your Home. Chicago: Bizbooks.

I often preach that styles rules are flexible and made for breaking, but there are times when a style makes so much sense it would be dumb to flout it. Citation styles help readers absorb complex information. Learn one and you’ll gain polish and clarity in your work—and big sloppy kisses from your copyeditor.

For Writers: When Help Is Hard to Take

As a writer, I sometimes receive smart suggestions from readers or editors. They rewrite a line, ask a pointed question, or present an argument that prompts major rethinking: maybe an entirely new direction for a plot, or the elimination of a character.

A writer should feel elated and grateful for such help, but it’s not always that easy. First we have to resent the suggestion a little and resist taking it. Then we have to kick ourselves for not thinking of it ourselves. Finally, when we know that we really, really want to use that idea, we have to wonder whether it’s fair game.

Is it fair to take someone else’s idea? Does it make us less of a writer?

Of course it’s fair. It’s a reminder that not even the greatest writers go straight into type without drafting and redrafting, editing, and revising. It’s part of the publishing process. If a reader, editor, or copyeditor is being paid to vet our writing, the whole point is for their work to improve our own. The continuing brouhaha over whether Jane Austen was edited baffles me, implying as it does that other writers weren’t.

My friend Amy Timberlake, whose picture book The Dirty Cowboy won the Golden Kite award in 2003, has posted a generous and revealing account of all the help she received while writing and revising that book. But as Amy says, ultimately the writer can take credit: “You take other people’s good suggestions and you fit them into your story using your voice, your love of language, your pacing and pauses, and your sense of humor (among other things). Believe me, you tell your story your way. So if someone offers you a good suggestion—take it. Take it and run with it and make it your own.”

Amy reminds us that writing is a “communal art.” So if you’re a grateful writer, here are some ways to give back.

—Take a few minutes to read any cover letter that comes with feedback from an editor. It probably contains instructions for reading and marking the manuscript, and it almost certainly contains a deadline.

—Respond to every question or comment at the very least with a checkmark to show that you didn’t miss it.

—If you’re happy with the feedback and there’s an appropriate place to say so in print (such as an acknowledgments page), include that reader or editor in your thanks.