Writer, Editor, Helper

Does Your Novel Need a Copyeditor before Submission?

In the writers’ groups where I hang out online, these queries are evergreen:

• How do I know if I need a copyeditor before I submit my work to an agent or editor?
• How do I find a good copyeditor?
• How much does copyediting cost?

The replies and comments are typically so head-spinning in their range and variety that no one could blame writers for being confused. And who can blame a writer for resisting an expense they aren’t convinced is necessary?

Should Your Novel Have Chapter Numbers or Chapter Titles?

Earlier this year, Fiction+ considered whether a novel should have a table of contents. Although it might seem to be a matter of personal preference, there are strong practical reasons for including or not including a TOC, depending on a book’s genre and format.

Is the same thing true when deciding whether chapters should be numbered or titled? A survey of my social media turned up a number of reasons to go one way or the other, along with some strong opinions:

3 Easy E-Tricks for Writers, and 1 for Fun

Almost every writer I know has a love-hate relationship with their writing program, whether it’s Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Scrivener, or a yellow legal pad. It’s clear there’s no single perfect choice for drafting, editing, and formatting your work for publication.

Scrivener is great for drafting but has limited formatting capabilities. Docs is great for collaborations, and it can handle basic formatting, but it lacks compatibility with professional formatting and editing tools like PerfectIt and the add-ins from the Editorium. MS Word is the publishing workhorse, more or less required for submitting to agents and editors and publishers, but it’s pricey and not always friendly.

Getting to know your word processor better will help you love it more. Here are some moves you can use in Word and Docs and sometimes Scrivener.

Does Your Novel Need a Table of Contents?

From our own reading, most of us know that some paperback and hardcover novels have a table of contents page in the front and some don’t. Lurking online, I perceive a widespread notion that tables of contents are old-fashioned and pointless for fiction. There’s also fear that a contents page wastes valuable marketing space in online “see inside” previews, preventing readers from getting to the good stuff that will tempt them to buy.

Why then do some best-selling, award-winning novels have a table of contents, sometimes several pages long? As you’ll see, sometimes it makes sense.

How to Reorganize Book Chapters with a Click

One of my favorite MS Word tricks allows a novelist (or any book writer) to view and organize their chapters in the Navigation pane (an option under the View tab). Using this feature, I can see all my chapter titles at a glance, and I can go instantly to the one I want by clicking on its title. Moving a chapter to a different location is as easy as clicking and dragging it down the pane. Numbered chapters renumber themselves like magic any time I change their order.

If you ever need to add, delete, or move a chapter while you’re drafting, you can make good use of this trick.

How to Mention a Real Newspaper, Book, or Song in Fiction

Narrators and characters in novels and other creative writing can talk about whatever they want. A character might read the Chicago Sun-Times; they might say they like to sing “Drivers License” while brushing their teeth. A narrator might mention a famous poem or novel or TV show: “The host didn’t mention that he’d heard the same joke on The Simpsons.”*

Writers often ask how to style such titles. With italics? Quotation marks? Title caps?

Counting Pages or Words in a Manuscript Submission

Long before a book is printed, while the text is still in manuscript form, editors at publishing houses speak in terms of word count, not page count. An appropriate word count for a project depends on the kind of book. A picture book editor might think in terms of 0–750 words. An editor acquiring young-adult fantasy novels will consider anything from about 80,000 words and up. Thrillers, graphic novels, romances—their editors all have target ranges for the length of book readers expect. There are always exceptions, of course.

Page counts, on the other hand, are for printed books. Designers and production editors use a manuscript’s word count to estimate how many pages the published book will be, taking into account how they want it to look: how large the pages will be, how much white space is wanted, whether illustrations will add to the page count, etc.

Why then, at the querying stage, are writers almost always asked to submit a set number of pages instead of a set number of words?

Abbreviations in Fiction

 

A great many common abbreviations* behave perfectly well in any fiction or nonfiction context, including dialogue, when the general guidelines in CMOS are observed: Mr., Ms., CEO, p.m., PhD, UFO. Editors should have no quarrel with them, as long as they’re styled consistently. If it’s 11:00 a.m. in chapter 1, it shouldn’t be 2 PM in chapter 3. That’s what style sheets are for.

Nonfiction versus Fiction

On the other hand, some of Chicago’s advice for wrangling abbreviations (see CMOS 10.3) can be safely ignored by fiction writers and editors. In a novel or short story,

Crediting Images at an Author Website

Your author website probably has a nice banner image, and if you blog, you probably look online for eye-catching artwork to illustrate or decorate your posts or pages. Maybe your About page features a professional headshot or images from book signings or other events. When you borrow images from another creator, whether you found them in printed form, online, or crumpled in your mother’s coat pocket, there will be times when you’re obliged to acknowledge that the work isn’t yours.

In printed books, such credits can appear in captions, footnotes, endnotes, and bibliographies. Sometimes credits are gathered on the copyright page or in a list of illustrations. But those options weren’t exactly invented with your website vibe in mind. Here, I’ll explain how you can easily adapt several of these traditional crediting methods for website use.

Formatting Text Messages in Fiction

 

 

In our Fiction+ series, we set out to help CMOS users adapt Chicago style to creative writing contexts. Sometimes, Chicago’s general guidelines already work just fine; other times, they need a little noodge to sit comfortably on a page of fiction. And often, as is the case in this post, they are just one option among many that may suit the material.

So my aim today isn’t to decide the best way to format text messages in fiction, but to show how different stylings suit different kinds of work and to point out problems that might arise.

When Page Numbers Don’t Help

 

Editors are never happy. First they throw a fit if you send in a manuscript without page numbers, but once you send them a paginated work, they complain when you try to discuss a sentence on page 67. What’s the deal?

Creative writers will benefit from understanding what editors and copyeditors face when it’s time to discuss changes to your manuscript.

Numbers in Creative Writing

 

 

When we think about writing numbers, we tend to think of research papers, financial reports, sports columns, and other quantity-laden nonfiction settings. But novelists and playwrights and poets also puzzle over how to style numbers. Some happily leave such matters to their copyeditors, while others spend valuable writing time out of a compulsion to get it “right.” If you’re the latter type (or their copyeditor), read on for comfort and advice.

Fiction+ for Creative Writers and Their Editors

Although I officially retired from my work at the Chicago Manual in December, I couldn’t say no to an opportunity to continue hanging around the CMOS Online Shop Talk blog when Russell Harper—the new editor—invited me to share a new corner of the blog with him called Fiction+. There we’ll focus on how to cope when Chicago style rules don’t quite seem to fit the creative context of a novel, story, poem, or play.

Russell kicked things off last week with a post on comma splices; today I interview Janet Burroway, author of the classic textbook Writing Fiction, a staple in creative writing classes that has just been issued in a new 10th edition.

If you’re interested in creative writing or editing, be sure to check out Fiction+. You can sign up for alerts if you want to be sure to catch new posts, and I’ll continue to give you a heads-up here.

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Photo: Woman Writing, by August Macke (1887–1914), courtesy Wikimedia Commons

 

Too Late to Learn? Helping the Reluctant with Technology

 

 Image: "Creative daydreaming" Found on flickrcc.net

Everyone has at least one friend, relative, or colleague who is not yet competent in even the most basic computer tasks: creating a document, e-mailing, browsing online.

It’s hard to imagine an academic with poor computer skills. And yet, they aren’t that rare. I know, because I work with them. One correspondent doesn’t know how to open an attachment to an e-mail. Another asks me to convert the edited chapters of his book to an old version of Microsoft Word. Another asks to dictate her page-proof corrections over the phone. One author still sends his manuscripts in WordStar, for pity’s sake. (You have to be a best seller to get away with that, by the way; others must submit work in an approved format.)

I understand the frustrations and inefficiencies of wrestling with technology. Nothing has sent me closer to the brink, and I still struggle with my attitude. This week my colleagues and I must learn a new markup technology for the manuscripts we prepare for typesetting. I am beyond grumpy about this. On the training agenda I see a blur of items that mean nothing to me. “Item 1: Review WFDW concepts.” Googling WFDW takes me to the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife. I see a possible connection with opening a can of worms.

In “Ten Reasons People Resist Change,” Rosabeth Moss Kanter summarizes with great insight reasons that apply well to our resistance to technology. “More Work” and “Ripple Effects” pretty well explain my suspicion of WFDW, but Kanter suggests other, more serious insecurities and fears: of uncertainty, of loss of control, of incompetence.

And yet there are compelling reasons—especially for the elderly—to be able to navigate and communicate online. Obviously, it will allow them to work longer into their dotage and to maintain contact with friends and relatives, but beyond that it opens a world of help and entertainment and solace. I’m convinced that computer skills can significantly improve the quality of life even in the face of gradually failing faculties.

Because impaired vision and hearing and motor skills are practical impediments to computer use, the earlier a person acquires the skills, the more likely they will be able to continue and adapt them as needed.* If you have a friend or relative or colleague who struggles with the most basic computer tasks, and whose only real impediment so far is a lack of motivation, consider encouraging them. Determine which type of skill is of most use or interest, and coach them in it.

If I could wish just one computer competence for everyone, it would be for everyone to learn how to use e-mail or social media to send and receive photos, documents, and links to Web sites.

My second wish would be easier: for everyone to learn how to conduct online searches. In helping someone master this, I would make Google** or another search engine the home page of their Internet browser; I would make sure that either the browser icon or the Google icon were visible on the desktop; and I would show them how to type queries into the box. I would help them find sites they are motivated to visit (travel, business, health, or hobby sites) and then show them how to bookmark their favorite pages and create folders for organizing them. I would show them how to look at their browsing history and—since privacy is sometimes a debilitating concern—how to delete that history.

Since scholars are a minority, a wish that everyone would learn to use MS Word to produce flawless manuscripts must fall to third place. But if I were the queen of academe, here are the minimum word-processing competencies I would bestow on my subjects:

—How to indent paragraphs, either by using a tab character or by setting the “ruler” or by applying a “style.”

—How to add an embedded footnote or endnote using the automatic feature, and how always to add notes that way, rather than by typing some of them in manually.

—How to track changes when editing a document so someone else can review it.

When they are comfortable with word processing, writers have the flexibility to edit and improve their work. The stress of writing for publication is reduced; relationships with editors and publisher are enhanced. What’s more, well-prepared documents are more likely to appear in print the way they are intended. The less time a copy editor has to spend to clean up a document, the lower the risk of her introducing errors and deleting things, and the more time she can spend on actual editing. The work will benefit. The reader will benefit.

And once I figure out the WFDW, I might have time to go fishing.

______

*To complain about my use of they as a singular, you can go here or here or here.

**I like Google because its home page is spare and simple, and it prompts a single task: to type a search term. It also has a menu at the top that includes Google Maps and YouTube—two extremely useful Web sites for information and amusement.

Originally published at Lingua Franca blog, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 26, 2013.

 

 

Tech Tips: Two Chores Made Easy

Today I have tips for disposing of two tasks in mere seconds. While less savvy writers and editors are laboring over for the same chores for hours, we can go dancing!

[NB: Back up work before making any global change to a document.]

Removing All Field Codes (Including Hyperlinks) from a Document

Do you ever run across strange, shadowy, curly-bracketed expressions lurking in your documents? Or chunks of text that turn gray when you click anywhere within them? Or lots of hyperlinked URLs that are merely excess baggage if a document is headed for a print publication? These bits of tagged text can be extremely useful—essential—for compiling data, updating documents, and other chores I almost never need to do. You might actually need your field codes, so consider carefully before you wipe them out. Once you’re certain they’re disposable, there’s a way to trash them all at once, in two seconds. (Don’t worry about disturbing automatically numbered or bulleted lists or linked footnotes or endnotes. Although they may fall within the scary gray description, they’re a bit more difficult to dislodge. See below.)

1. Highlight the chunk you want to remove fields from. (Ctrl-A highlights the entire document.)

2. Hit Shift-Ctrl-F9.

Ta-daa! All gone.

Learn more about inserting and deleting field codes.

Converting Automatic Numbering to Typed Numbers

Like field codes, automatic numbering can save lifetimes of word processing. This feature allows you to add or delete an item near the top of a numbered list and watch all the numbers below it neatly increase or decrease by one. However, when the auto-feature isn’t needed or welcome, simply removing the numbered formatting in Microsoft Word leaves the text without any numbers at all.

Fortunately, there’s an easy way to save yourself keying in all the missing numbers. It involves putting a toe into the waters of Visual Basic, but don’t be frightened.* I promise: you can do it. I did it, and I’m here to tell the tale. Back up your document and go for it:

1. Highlight the chunk of text that contains the automatic numbering you want to convert to typed numbers. (Don’t worry about automatically numbered footnotes and endnotes; they’ll survive.)

2. Click Alt-F11. A Microsoft Visual Basic screen will open.

3. Under the View tab, choose Immediate Window. A little window will open across the bottom of the Visual Basic screen.

4. Type the following or paste it in:

Selection.Range.ListFormat.ConvertNumbersToText

5. Hit Enter.

6. Close the Visual Basic screen.

That’s it—your numbering should now be typed instead of automatic.

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*I confess that I never work in Visual Basic and have no idea what it is. My level of understanding is like that of a rat running a maze to get a hit of cocaine: I do the steps; I get what I want. I’m telling you this so you don’t come back to me if it goes wrong. You did back up your work, right?

~ ~ ~

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Going Up? Plan Ahead

                                     Photo: Alyson Hurt

A few months ago I encountered a bank of hotel elevators that made a big impression on me. This might be old hat to you,* but to me it was a wondrous invention: there were no buttons inside the elevators for choosing your floor.

Instead, you chose your floor from a panel outside the elevators. You pressed 14, and a display told you which elevator to wait for. Meanwhile someone else pressed 5 and was given a different elevator. If a conference session ended and twenty people rushed the elevators, they would each pick a floor and obediently sort themselves into little groups outside their assigned elevators.

Once inside, everyone was a little creeped out that there were no buttons for choosing a floor. “What if I picked the wrong floor?” someone asked. I had to admit I’d already done that. I’d had no choice but to get out on the wrong floor and ring for another elevator.

Over the next few days, everyone was talking about the elevators, and nearly everyone I talked to hated them. In spite of my initial detour, I loved them. If you have six elevators and thirty people going to fourteen floors, you can either let the crowd randomly and inefficiently choose the number of elevators, floors, and stops—or you can let a nifty computer algorithm minimize the number of stops each elevator makes by assigning the elevator based on floor choice. What’s not to love? Waits are short; trips are fast.

So . . . I know you can’t wait to see what cockamamie* metaphor for copyediting this inspires. It’s this: copyeditors can improve their efficiency by devising strategies before editing begins.

I’ve reviewed plenty of manuscripts where a copyeditor has gotten into deep trouble by conforming a document to house style when it doesn’t suit. A thoughtful review before barging in would have prompted doubts: is it really wise to change all book and article titles to headline casing? Will the section numbers you’re deleting be needed later?

To preview a document, look closely at any material that isn’t a straight text paragraph. Look especially at the styling of subheads, lists, bullets, tables, and captions. With regard to each element make a strategy:

—If no particular style dominates, plan on editing to house style.

—If an element is not written to house style but is clear and consistent, ask whether it can stay as is. If you have to get permission for this, your best argument (after the most obvious one of saving time) is that in changing it, you are likely to introduce errors and typos.

—If an element is in a foreign style and is sloppy and inconsistent, look over all the instances of that element and devise the most efficient remedy. Don’t assume it will be your house style.

There’s nothing more disheartening to a copyeditor than having to start over midway through a job in order to cut losses. There’s no quick button to press once you’ve committed to a bad choice. Better to make the right choices before you get on board.

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*I’m older than you, so I get to say things like that.

 

 

So You Think You Know Where You’re Going?

Photo courtesy Erin O'Keefe

Have you ever been put out of a cab after you waited forever and finally lassoed one and got in, and after sailing past a street where you would have turned (if you had been driving), you said, “Shouldn’t you have turned there?” and the driver slammed to the curb and said, “You can get another cab,” leaving you incredulously asking “What­—? Are you kidding? Are you putting me out?” and, seeing his face, had to grab your things and slam the door (cab drivers hate that) and hike back four blocks to the thoroughfare and wait for another cab?

Me, too.

And isn’t that exactly the feeling you get when you suddenly run into trouble with a tricky word-processing feat that you’ve done before with no problem? “What­—?” you think, as you start the slog back to the beginning.

In my case, it’s always my fault. I left out a step, didn’t prepare properly, hit the wrong key. Or as that cab driver might say, I thought I knew the fastest route and bullied my way to a dead end.

This time it was the NoteStripper macro,* which miraculously unlinks all the endnotes or footnotes in a document, leaving the superscript callouts in the text and compiling the corresponding notes into a matching list. Even more miraculous: the program can do the reverse; that is, it can embed notes that have been hard-typed.

Embedding notes is the more complicated macro and calls for careful preparation of the document. NoteStripper comes with clear and detailed directions,** but for those of you who like to find your own way, let me just mention a few that will kick you to the curb if not followed:

—The number of notes must match the number of callouts.
—Every note must start with a numeral: clear out any stray spaces or tabs.
—All note callouts must be formatted as superscripts.
—Nothing else in the document can be superscripted.

I was using the easier macro, converting notes into text, but even then, my attempts to convert a large file (with 1,040 notes) failed on my first three tries. On an impulse, I read the instructions, which told me that sometimes a file can simply be corrupted at some point. I tried again and saw that the file converted successfully up to a point before it crashed. So I deleted the first note after the crash point. That did the trick: the file converted in seconds, after which I typed the corrupted note back in.

On the night I lost that cab, the second one made up for it: a brand-new car, a quiet jazz CD, and a lovely driver who didn’t smoke or text. He took the same route as the other guy, but this time I kept my mouth shut—and was home in record time.

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*From Jack Lyon’s Editorium.

**Not all products offer such helpful guidance. If you find yourself trying to make sense of gobbled directions, read my Troubleshooting Guide to Following Instructions.

 

 

Master the Basics and Feel the Power

Not long ago I watched over a friend’s shoulder as she made corrections to a document in MS Word, lumbering along in slow motion with her mouse, and after about two minutes of this, it was all I could do to keep from snarling “Let me drive!” and knocking her out of the chair.

Okay, so I’m working on the patience thing. But meanwhile, I have a feeling that copyeditors everywhere are wasting billions of hours and a lot of carpal tunnel nerves simply because they don’t know the most basic moves in word processing.

An example: when my friend wanted to undo an action, she motored her mouse up to the toolbar and clicked on the Undo arrow. About the fifth time she did that, I couldn’t stop myself from saying, “You know, Ctrl+Z is easier.” Embarrassed, she mumbled something about bad habits.

Here’s what I propose, and it’s simple, and it will change your life: over the next few days, make note of the computer action you perform most, and if you aren’t using a keyboard shortcut for it, find one. Here are two good ways to find a shortcut:*

1. Search online, e.g., “MS Word undo.”
   
2. Within Word, go to Tools, then Customize, then Keyboard. (In Word 2007, start with the Office Button, then Word Options, then Customize, then Keyboard Shortcuts.) I always scroll down in the Categories box and choose All Commands, which provides a list in the Commands box of everything you might want to do. Click on the chore you want to do faster, and you’ll see what the keyboard command is for that chore. And (this is the most exciting part), if you don’t like it, you can change it. And if there isn’t one, you can assign one.
   

The next part is admittedly more challenging: force yourself to use the shortcut. But I guarantee that after the first awkwardness, you will feel the power! And you’ll go back for more.

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*You can also try the Help files in MS Word, although older versions tend to recommend clicking on menus and toolbar icons instead of using the keyboard.

Photo: She Ra, 1980s Princess of Power Doll, by Speckled Owl, courtesy of Flickr

Dodging Editorial Bullets

Last evening I attended a lovely cello recital in a private home in my neighborhood. Sitting in the parlor listening to Brahms on a 1768 Benjamin Banks, many of us deep in reverie (or snoozing—hard to tell), I was startled to see a teacup roll off its saucer from the lap of my abstracted neighbor Peggy. I tensed for the crash, but the cup hit the plush Aubusson, somersaulted gently onto the wood floor, and miraculously righted itself without a sound. At a suitable moment, I retrieved it from under the settee and handed it back. Peggy inspected it for damage, caught her breath, and whispered “Spode!”

Walking home, I pulled out my cell phone, thinking how lucky Peggy had been not to break the china—and saw that my ringer was on. Full blast. This time the luck was mine, not to have jerked everyone awake with a tinny chorus of “Ain’t Misbehavin’.”

In copyediting, we forget, we overlook, we nod off. Often we catch our errors (or someone else does) before it’s too late, and no doubt we are happily unaware of many errors that make it into print. Copyediting and proofreading the sixteenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style, the team here caught typos and errors in every round, and every time, we felt the relief that comes with escaping shame and embarrassment, along with the naive hope that now it’s perfect.

But inevitably a few goofs are lurking in the pages. (And knowing our readers, we won’t remain unaware of them for long.)