How to argue with your editor

As I've said before, the writer’s relationship with their editor should be a professional one. Your editor is neither your mother, nor your best friend. S/he is there to work with you to make your book the best it can be.

Therefore arguing with them about every comma and editing change is not a good idea. If your book is being published by a publishing house, there will be House Style which has to be followed. There will be set, unchangeable rules about things like semi colons and certain word choices. Arguing about these things is simply a waste of time, as the publisher will not suddenly rewrite their style manual for you.

Most publishers follow the Chicago Manual of Style. Again, if there is something you want changed that breaks the rules in CMOS, you can stamp your feet as much as you like, but your change is not going to happen.

Outside of these things though, if you explain to your editor why you want something expressed a certain way, s/he will listen to you. If it’s not possible s/he will tell you why. It may be that your sentence had simply been unclear and s/he’d misunderstood what you were trying to convey.

As long as you remain polite and professional, it’s perfectly fine to argue with your editor. Just understand there are some things out of their power to change.

Helen Woodall
Helen.woodall@gmail.com

The worst typos in the Bible

An extremely rare and valuable edition of the bible went on sale late in 2015. It’s the Sinner’s Bible, the edition brought out by Robert Barker and Martin Lucas in 1631. It included several typos, but the most famous is the omission of the word *not* before the word *adultery* in the Ten Commandments.
The correct wording of Exodus 20: 14 is “You shall not commit adultery.”

There is also a 1682 edition of the bible nicknamed “The Cannibal’s Bible” because of a typo that said, “If the latter husband ate her” in Deuteronomy 24:3, which is meant to read: “If the latter husband hate her.”

All of which is proof, I suppose, that no matter how careful writers and editors might be, there’s always one error that slips through.


Helen Woodall
helen.woodall@gmail.com

Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and non-fiction. Rates on application.

Self editing checklist

Grammar Girl has posted a blog with a list of things writers should check. It’s excellent. Well worth paying attention to.

http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/grammar-girls-editing-checklist

Helen Woodall
helen.woodall@gmail.com

Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and non-fiction. Rates on application.

“Youse guys get off of the bed!”

“Youse guys get off of the bed!” aka Accents and Slang.

Between two villains or two teenagers this line is perfectly acceptable. Spoken by a CEO, millionaire, or university graduate not so much unless it’s a deliberate attempt to be funny. An author doesn’t need to have perfect grammar. However an author does need to have a basic feel for how her characters speak. And characters in well paid positions, or characters who went to a good school, would generally speak grammatically unless they were deliberately playing a part.

Therefore when the narrative has many grammatical errors, this raises flags in the reader’s mind. Either the book needs good editing or the author needs to listen to her editor and make some corrections. There is no excuse for constantly mistaking their/there, or other simple errors, anymore than there is for having characters speak poorly.

On a similar note, if you are using dialects, be very careful to have them checked by a person who speaks that dialect fluently. Nothing is worse than having a creole speaker break into latin in the middle of a sentence. Babelfish and other such programs are not infallible, so always check what you’ve written.

Helen Woodall
helen.woodall@gmail.com

Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and non-fiction. Rates on application.

Absolutely excellent article on self-editing

Adverbs, metaphors, similes, stage direction, lost body parts, physiology, passive voice, and “said”, all in one easy to read article.
Go. Read it.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kristen-lamb/six-easy-tips-for-selfedi_b_3838124.html

Helen Woodall
helen.woodall@gmail.com

Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and non-fiction. Rates on application.

Let’s just delete those justs

Sometimes I give an author a comment along the lines of, “You have used this word three times in this paragraph. Do a find and remove two thirds of the uses of this word in your story”.

The comments I get back run from, “Rats! I’d used ‘but’ too often and replaced some with ‘just’. Now I have too many ‘justs’.”  To, “Help! How do I do that?”

So first, to avoid the problem, you need to remember that although your heroine’s luminous jade-green eyes, are the most striking thing about her to you, your reader is not stupid and doesn’t need to be reminded about them on every second page. Tell us about them once or twice near the beginning of the book, preferably in someone else’s POV, then only mention them once or twice again in the story.

Then read through your book looking for “crutch” or unnecessary words. “Just”, “actually”, “then”, “approximately”, can often be removed without changing the meaning of your sentence in the slightest.

Now, if we’ve identified a problem, do a “find and replace”. Delete your crutch word and replace it with a symbol so you can easily notice the sentence when you read through your story. As you read through, often you’ll find nothing is needed, and all you have to do is delete the symbol. Sometimes you do need to replace it with a word or phrase. But watch out that you don’t just collect a new crutch word. Try to keep it fresh.

Helen Woodall

helen.woodall@gmail.com

Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and non-fiction. Rates on application.

An editor's take on humor.

An Editor's Erotic Tale of Really Awful Lines and Actions Deserving of a Snarky Blog by Valerie Mann & Kate Richards.
This is brilliant. Well worth reading. Warning: Do not eat or drink while reading!

http://fourstrongwomen.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/editors-erotic-tale-of-really-awful.html?zx=f364bef8eebbc511

Helen

Put your book on a diet

When your book is finished and you’ve let it sit a while, it’s time for you to put it on a diet. By this I mean to ruthlessly prune unnecessary words, sentences and even entire scenes.

Quite often a scene that made sense when you wrote it has become a waste of space by the end of the story, as the character development or place it was meant to show is no longer needed, or has been described much better elsewhere.

How many times have you written phrases like, “He blinked his eyes”. “She shrugged her shoulders”.

Stand in front of the mirror. Can you blink anything other than your eyes? Can you shrug anything other than your shoulders? No. “He blinked”. “She shrugged”, says it all.

Then there are sentences like, “She visibly shook with tension”. Uh-huh. While you’re there in front of the mirror try to shake invisibly. Doesn’t work does it?

There’s a lot of common phrases like these, and using them once or twice is not a problem. But if you find them cropping up again and again it’s time to put your book on a diet and get rid of them. They’ll grate on your readers’ nerves.

Helen Woodall

Helen.woodall@gmail.com