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When Editors Go Bad

 
 
This Sunday
04:05 / 30.11.05
There are times when an author clearly probably knew what they were doing and someone else - I'm presuming editor, here - stepped in and fucked things up. Spelling the (now dead) rapper's name, 'Easy E' (as a 'Gatherings' anthology did) or transforming all every 'cop' in the text to 'police' (as with a certain Greg Rucka Batman novel). This is annoying. When someone writes "commod' peanut butter" and gets back "commode peanut butter" there's obvious problems. There's also a risk of this with typesetters and such (usually a one-letter change, though, or one-time event like the issue of 'Wolverine' where "assassin" became "kike" by way of "killer" and some laziness slash bad computer skills), but with running problems... Is it just me? Am I paranoid about editors or do other people lay the blame on them, too? Terry Pratchett's Esk sic Esc, because the editor of one edition wasn't thinking about keyboards or something. Not that I know what an 'esk' is that it would be funnier or more of an allusion, but, still.
I kinda think the writer is almost always in the right as to how their material should be portrayed/framed/typeset and spelled, but maybe not.
Any examples of this, ever really annoy you? Who did you blame?
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
07:26 / 30.11.05
Anne Rice famously told her editor to stop making suggestions about style, content, length &c. as soon as she was sufficiently successful to get away with it, leaving her editor only to correct her apparently numerous spelling and grammar errors. First up, I believe sincerely that if you are making numerous spelling and grammar errors you have not spent enough time reading. Second up, I can't think of many authors in more dire need of a strong editor than Anne Rice, and while I can certainly understand the arguments for a publisher taking the money and printing the slurry, I don't think it's terribly good form.

The examples you have provided above all seem to be errors in copy editing or proofreading rather than manuscript editing - in effect, transcription errors or impositions of house style. Also, if you don't mind me saying, the examples you cite are all, with respect to their no doubt gifted creators, in genres which tend to be about shifting product rather than honing the most perfect transmission of authorial intent to the avid reader - comics and novels based on comic or role-playing game franchises.

Do you have a position on what an editor should be doing, or how an editor might add value to the process of creating a published work?
 
 
Jack Fear
09:42 / 30.11.05
I think maybe we need to differentiate between actual betrayal of authorial intention, and simple typographical carelessness—which, let's face it, can slip into the process at any stage.

I kinda think the writer is almost always in the right as to how their material should be portrayed/framed/typeset and spelled, but maybe not.

My friends in the publishing industry—some of whom have edited me—would beg to disagree. In fact one of the reasons that I'm doing so well as a freelancer (so far, touch wood) is that I have the ability to submit copy that is actually, y'know, usable—that doesn't require major life-saving editorial surgery.

Expressing oneself in writing is a terribly difficult skill, and most people never quite master it. This includes most writers.

And most people—again, this includes many writers—care little for the mechanics of the craft. And many writers flippantly assume that they can write any old shit, and the editor will fix it.

A career as a writer, like most careers in the arts, is at least as much a function of charisma, self-promotion, and the will to power as of actual skill. That is: I am a writer in large part because I say I am.

It is interestuing to note, however, that some years ago, when I applied for a position as editorial assistant at a trade journal, I didn't get the job—because a test that I took at the job interview indicated that my proofreading skills weren't up to snuff.
 
 
Cat Chant
10:21 / 30.11.05
Editing is a really hard, really skilled, really really useful job - you can't overrate the helpfulness of a good edit (by which I mean something between a beta-reading, a peer-review, and a copy-edit). Editing requires the ability to take the work's side against the author (when necessary, though hopefully the author is also on the work's side and will be able to respond joyfully to a good suggestion), without elevating your own personal reading prejudices to the level of objective truth.

When it goes wrong, though, it's fury-making to a degree which reminds me of Nick's diatribes against fanfiction as an assault on the writer's sense of self (with the work being seen as one of the ways the writer interfaces with the world). I had a horrible copy-edit done on a book chapter recently, where the editors kept going "But it's in the Chicago Manual of Style!" and refusing to admit that the application of the CMS rules was a subjective and skilled process, and that I had a genuine disagreement with them over the consistency and appropriateness of their interpretation of the CMS (eg when, in trying to get rid of 'scare quotes', they removed quotes from around a quotation; or when, in 'tidying up' a sentence structure they removed a deliberate allusion to a specific theorist's work; or when, without giving any justification at all, they took away a half-sentence which was the key to the ethical orientation of my argument). Copy-editing (which is all they claimed to be doing) segues imperceptibly into editing for sense, meaning, style and substance.

So editing's a risky business. I think the key is the ability to stand, to some extent, outside your own preferences - you might have written a sentence differently, but it takes an awful lot of skill, sensitivity, experience and judgement to be able to judge when the writer is aiming at something and failing, and when you as an editor are missing a point which another reader might respond to.
 
 
Jack Fear
10:50 / 30.11.05
Funny bit about the "scare quotes," actually, and an anecdote that supports this threads original thesis about overzealous editry: I remember reading a story in humorist Garrison Keillor's collection Happy To Be Here—don't remember the title, but it was about a rock'n'roll garage band—and there was one particular sentence that was a tour-de-force of nested quotes. In the first hardcover edition, it read something like this.

The article went on to say, "But the free-speech issue is not always so clear. Public-decency advocate John Smith says, 'There must always be a place in the community or those who stand up and say, "This is not okay. Now we say, 'Enough!'"'"

There may have been one more nested layer, but you get the idea. The passage actually depends upon an absurd piling-up of quotation marks for its comic effect.

Imagine my horror, then, when for the paperback edition some enterprising editor had amended the passage:

The article went on to say: But the free-speech issue is not always so clear. Public-decency advocate John Smith says, "There must always be a place in the community or those who stand up and say, This is not okay. Now we say, Enough!"

Which is perhaps "clearer," in some sense, but also entirely misses the point of the passage.
 
 
This Sunday
11:30 / 30.11.05
Here's the thing. I know that editors are important. I know they're useful, commercially and artistically. Some of them, anyway, as there are of course, various levels of competency and usefulness. But, primarily, yeah, we need editors. As writers, as readers.
I don't mean editorial is unnecessary, particularly, but that writers should, in large, be better editors of their own work. I don't agree with "kill your babies" but y'know, if the legs ain't working, hack'em off at the knees and give the kid some cyborg limb-grafts or something. Don't just argue the purity or naturalness of the weaker.
I have at least one positioned piece that made me some decent money and would've been entirely unreadable and shitty if the editor had not made certain suggestions that I - moaning and thrashing all the way - went ahead and ran with.
I logically know that editors are important. My gut reaction, my reflex, is an anti-editor one, though. It's probably some childhood complex I never shook off.

Copy-editing, on the other hand... I don't think I want to shake off dislike. I know it's necessary, somebody's got to do it, but get the feeling that usually, anyone who should be doing it, is doing something better. Maybe that's just a small-press thing, though. Probably.

These things aren't limited to the cheaper imprints, though. Not entirely. Look at 'Ulysses', early printings and current. Or Marshall McCluhan's not in the reissue of a book where he has to state, in the new intro, that his Shakespeare misquote was deliberate, and that the further allusions were also intentional. Because an editor thought he fucked up and fixed the quote despite his insistance that he was doing it on purpose. I've an Amiri Baraka collection around here, somewhere, with the machinegun sound-effects in a poem rendered as "[machine gun sounds]" as opposed to the actual sounding-out. That wasn't his fault, I'm sure.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
12:11 / 30.11.05
OK - so why didn't McCluhan, for example, read the proofed copy and identify the misquotation? The job of the fact-checker there was not to make him look stupid. Not knowing the writer's mind, he did that job to the best of his ability, probably by inserting a note that this was a misquotation. The editor then received this book and passed this correction, thinking that he was saving him from looking like an idiot. Why didn't McCluhan either pick this up on rereading his proof or insert a stet against it in the first place?

Basically, a dislike of editors is perfectly sensible in a writer - as JF mentions above, part of "being a writer" is self-belief, and having somebody telling you where you could do something better is likely to interfere with that self-belief. It also undermines the romantic idea that writing comes into the poet's breast in pure and complete form. Editors may make changes to texts which the writer does not want changed, at which point antagonism is very likely to follow. In artistic terms, it depends of course on the quality of the editor. There's a purposive question as well - Anne Rice and J K Rowling would probably be far better with a strong editor, but realistically their books sell independently of many of the qualities editors are expected to help to augment, so from the point of view of a publisher where is the profit? Editors, if they are doing their jobs, protect the reputation of their publisher and make their authors' books more likely to sell. Unfortunately, you can't really tell whether, cet. par. , a book without editing would do either task more effectively.
 
 
matthew.
12:23 / 30.11.05
I couldn't live with an editor. As a writer, I think the editor is the second only to the author for importance in the publication of texts. Without the editor, the text is a large, bloated, mass of jumbled words with a meaning buried in it like treasure. The meaning and the brilliance are teased out by the editor in a process that requires great skills and great patience, because it's the editor that has to butt heads.

I use two editors: one's a poet who loves to edit. He's good for word choice and lyricism. He makes my words flow much better. The other one works for an advertising firm, so her editing skills are more "practical," as in she helps strengthen my cultural meme disguised as a text.

Anne Rice needs an editor like the Pope needs Catholics.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
12:31 / 30.11.05
I think those might be beta readers rather than editors, matt, which is another interesting question - what is the difference between an editor proper and a friend who reads your work and gives suggestions?
 
 
Jack Fear
12:45 / 30.11.05
I couldn't live with an editor.

S/B "without"? (Thereby inadvertently proving your point?)
 
 
Alex's Grandma
18:18 / 30.11.05
What is the difference between an editor proper and a friend who reads your work and gives suggestions?

An editor as in an obstacle that has to be negotiated on the way to to the hearts of your adoring public, rather like that cruel PE teacher who made you go over the vaulting horse again and again back in junior school 'for your own good.' He or she is a bitter, mortal enemy who reads your work and gives suggestions, whereas friends, on the other hand, are simply people that you doesn't have to speak to, ever again, if they've got anything less than effusive praise for the material in question.

That's my opinion anyway, and I'm sticking to it.
 
 
This Sunday
19:02 / 30.11.05
If a friend or friendly favor-reader rewrites you, you disagree, and they keep their version and send it to the publisher... they'd be an ass. If they do it and get paid for it, they might be an editor.
Me, biased?
 
 
Jack Fear
19:33 / 30.11.05
Maybe we should clarify exactly what it is that an editor does, because we seem to be operating under several different assumptions—some of them only lightly touched by the gentle hand of reality.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
21:16 / 30.11.05
Well ok JF, but it seems to depend. Are we talking about a magazine/newspaper editor (and I suspect even then, though I wouldn't know, that there are various distinctions,) or a fiction editor at a publishing house, say? The former, I'm guessing, is in effect your employer at the office, with a fairly specific agenda in terms of the mag or paper's remit, which as a contributor you'd presumably be aware of, or at least, more fool you if you weren't. Whereas the role of the latter seems a lot more fluid - the novelist, ideally, writes what he or she 'damn well pleases' with minimal interference, that's the point of the job, I'd have said, otherwise, morally, aren't you as teh author almost bound to run into thorny questions about whose name should really be on the cover of the book, if you see what I mean.

Or to put it another way, if your novel is as heavily edited as something like the complete works of Jeffrey Archer *allegedly* were, what (moral, not legal,) right would you then have to pick up all the money? At what stage would the novel you'd ripped out bleeding from your heaving chest turn into a collaboration?

If your editor's doing a lot more than using spellcheck, I'd say, then it should be a worry.

How much of a worry though, I'm not sure.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
22:11 / 30.11.05
I don't know - I mean, you don't design the cover, do you? Or bind the books - lots of people contribute paid work to turn a manuscript into salable product...
 
 
matthew.
22:12 / 30.11.05
Haha, Jack Fear. Thanks for pointing that out.
 
 
matthew.
23:01 / 30.11.05
Haus - one could say that my two friends are "beta-readers," but I think that they both function as an editor in that they make valuable suggestions, alterations, and comments. They also spell- and grammar-check. One of them helps shapes the prose into a more poetic sound. The other editor helps make cut down on the useless information. If all these functions are not editor, then I am hard-pressed to define editor, because I pay these people. Not a lot; I'm a starving artist. But I work at/run a restaurant, so they get free food. It's the barter system for editorial skills.

I think we can all happily agree that the editor's function is fluid and changing. Their purpose changes as the needs of the writers require. In terms of "beta-readers," that's what I use Barbelith for. The two items I have posted on Barbelith have been second drafts, both of them, before they are ready to be submitted to someone I am paying (through food and good cheer). To me, the manuscript/text is a very fluid thing, never to be pinned down. A text is infinite; it is the editor's job to keep it within the realms of the readable and enjoyable.
 
 
Jack Fear
23:25 / 30.11.05
Alex: You're quite correct in that an editor's job will vary immensely in accordance with hir circumstances. Newspaper and newsmagazine editors—as well as editors of technical manuals and instructional material—concern themselves primarily with (a) factual accuracy and (b) clarity: style and le mot juste factor very little into the equation. Accuracy and clarity are just as important to your lifestyle magazines, but there's another, more subtle editorial function here—the maintenance of a particular tone.

Look at The New Yorker. It employs some very talented writers, with strong visions—Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Orlean, Anthony Lane—but the work that appears in the magazine, although touched with individual voices, is identifiably "New Yorker prose"—middlebrow cool, balanced, understated. That tone is the end result of a strong editorial vision, and it's slightly different from the tone of, say, Harper's or The Atlantic or Vanity Fair—all of which, in turn, have their own editorial voices.

This same model of tone is presumably also the editorial remit for series fiction or "brand" fiction by divers hands—Star Trek novels, Harlequin romances (or your Mills & Boon), popular how-to and travel guides (factual accuracy is tantamount, yeah, but part of the appeal of Lonely Planet or the ________ for Dummies books is a consistent and engaging voice).

For comics, it's another story again. At Marvel and DC, a single editor will handle an entire line of related books, and will be responsible for maintaining internal consistency as well as overall thematic approach (e.g. Dan DiDio's nixing any mention of Hypertime and quashing anything he deems too silly or campy). Editorial staff may brainstorm story arcs and special events: indeed, under the classic Marvel contract the editor, rather than the nominal writer of the book, was considered, for legal purposes, the author of the work.

The role of the editor in shaping fiction will obviously vary widely with the style of the editor and the requirements of the author and the work in question. The classic model of the editor, of course, is Maxwell Perkins, who took on the punishing job of turning Thomas Wolfe's three-foot high stack of typescript into a best-selling novel. Or Ezra Pound, il miglior fabbrio, who wrestled with a version of Eliot's The Waste Land twice as long and half as good as the one we know now, and beat it into submission.

Note, however, that in none of these cases are spellchecking and punctuation the primary purviews. Proofreading is a separate, though related, function.

Oh, and these comments...

At what stage would the novel you'd ripped out bleeding from your heaving chest turn into a collaboration? If your editor's doing a lot more than using spellcheck, I'd say, then it should be a worry.

...seem to confirm your view of what a writer (or indeed, any artist) does is also only vaguely acquainted with Dame Reality.

The Lone-Promethean-Genius-Working-in-a-Holy-Vacuum thing is a pernicious myth, man. That is to say: the rankest bullshit. Making art is a job, man, a job like any other: art is a product. No product reaches the marketplace without passing through a quality-control process. And that process invariably—in-fucking-variably—makes the product a better, stronger product.
 
 
Jack Fear
23:28 / 30.11.05
(Assuming, of course—he said, backpedaling furiously—that the qulaity-control process is working as it should. That is, in a perfect world, all other things being equal, mediated product will be better than unmediated.)
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
08:35 / 01.12.05
I do a bit of (umpaid) copy-editing, for a postgraduate research journal (i.e. run by and for postgraduates, no professional input). I can, I think, be quite heavy-handed, though since reading about Deva's awful experience I have tried to be a little less doctrinaire when it comes to some things. But my chief aim is always to try to make the material more easily understandable, and this does sometimes mean moving sentences and parts of sentences around a bit - I always indicate when I do that. I mean - I am involved in the discipline myself, but I usually don't know anything about the specific subjects, so will ask for clarification if something isn't clear to me (on the grounds that it won't be clear to other general readers - I do wonder how many general readers there are likely to be...).

My biggest issue is changing the work of people who don't have English as a first language (which I find I need to do a lot, and not just in matters such as removing definite articles). My second is whittling down the amount of redundant verbiage (but I might stop doing this so much) - a common fault among English-speaking academics.

I'm sure I sometimes offend people (and I know I don't like it when people tinker with my work, heavens) but sometimes I do think it is justified. There was one poor chap who wanted to thank the 'inextinguishable' librarians at such and such an institution, and I changed it to 'indefatigable' twice before he cut out the adjective altogether... I still think I was correct...
 
 
grant
13:06 / 01.12.05
On the job title/role thing: I'm an editor. It's what it says next to my name on the masthead, anyway. "Associate Managing Editor." (Although I have to admit our real managing editor is only credited as a senior writer, causing much contention whenever it comes up.)

Most of what I do is writing. All the writers also do proofreading (looking for grammar mistakes & typos) and a little copy-editing (making sure sentences conform to house style and flow nicely, as well as rudimentary fact-checking). The most "editorial" thing I do is decide what goes in the paper in a little eight-page section.

That's the main thing the editors above me do -- they decide what goes in the paper and what doesn't. Anyone can submit a lead, which is an idea for a story. But it's up to an editor to decide what will actually *make* a story, and how prominently it will be displayed in the publication -- part of that "identity" thing Jack talks about upstream.

In TV news, an editor does something completely different, but that hasn't come up in this discussion.
 
 
grant
13:08 / 01.12.05
I do a bit of (umpaid) copy-editing,

Heheheheheh.
 
 
nyarlathotep's shoe horn
14:57 / 01.12.05
where would TS Eliot's "The Wasteland" be without the auspicious edits of Ezra Pound?
probably unread in an unmanageable pile somewhere.

reminds me of an anecdote about Spider Robinson, before he was published. He believed that editors didn't really read manuscripts in their entirety, so he included a line in an otherwise unexceptional domestic scene:
then the couch jumped up like a giant pumpernickel and danced around the room.
he submitted the manuscript.
they accepted.
he sat down with an editor, who went over it with him.
they came to *the* line.
the editor said, "I understand what you're trying to say here." and then crossed it out.

Robert Heinlein believed that you should always leave intentional errors in the manuscript to give editors something to do that doesn't jeopardize the rest of the story.

ta
tenix
 
 
Jack Vincennes
17:06 / 01.12.05
If your editor's doing a lot more than using spellcheck, I'd say, then it should be a worry.

Does this matter to you (Alex and anyone else reading this) as much in your capacity of reader as in your capacity as a writer? I don't think (for example) that if I found out Nabokov's editor had excised from Lolita long and extremely dull chapter on the pet rabbits of Humbert Humbert's childhood I would feel outrage that Nabokov's artistic vision had been shat upon, but rather relief that I'd not had to read a long and extremely, etc, etc.
 
 
astrojax69
19:15 / 01.12.05
i edit my director's research and talks - we do a lot of work together on these documents, keeping in of course the actual factual matter of his theses and the data, etc, but taking the intent of the piece and finding a voice for it that suits the message, bearing in mind the intent of the effect of the message on its readers. (we are a research centre with an intl'l profile. actually, it is enormous fun spending hours on a single paragraph!)

i know this is different to editing fiction, but i also write and have a workshop group who are all writing a novel at the moment, working with each other as 'readers' and sometimes editors. i want eventually to find an editor with whom i can work closely to get the most out of the manuscript i first draft [all right, tenth draft!!].

i see an editor, in either side of writing, as a writing coach. they should always be the words the writer would/could use, but drawn out through a process where the style and content is evaluated and discussed in light of the intent.

i guess if you don't know what you want to say then an 'editor' might become a collaborator, but if you don't know what you want to say you probably aren't ready to engage an editor...
 
 
Digital Hermes
19:25 / 01.12.05
The Lone-Promethean-Genius-Working-in-a-Holy-Vacuum thing is a pernicious myth, man. That is to say: the rankest bullshit.

Amen, brother.

I've been reading this thread being at turns amused and appreciative. It seems as though an important element to consider here is spectrum. There may be some evil, misguided or myopic editors out there, who seem to revel in destroying any element of the original artistic merit, and there may be some writers who are capable of producing spotless works without need of revision, but both are so rare they should be considered mythical.

I'm in a poetry workshop right now, being run by a good friend of mine, who also happens to be a brilliant poet, in my opinion. He has often said, "there's no poem that couldn't be made better." Once I got over thinking that every word I wrote either was or should have been pure, channelled God, I became, and still am, hungry for editors. I choose them based on their relentlessness, and their devotion to the work above all, above even the writer.

I had a debate as to whether or not re-writes were necessary for a short story someone had given me to read. "I'm happy with what I wrote," they opined, but you being happy and your readers being happy(or at the very least clearly spoken to) is the difference between someone waiting for a muse, and a writer.

As a side note, in terms of published authors: another friend, this one the manager of a bookstore, has noticed a trend. The newest Harry Potter is supposedly considered the best yet, followed closely by the second (or third? I don't really follow the series myself) which was the last time she had an editor, not counting this one, where an editor has returned. The book is also smaller.

Robert Jordan, who could cut and paste the word 'sword' a hundred thousand times and people would still buy his books, has so much useless detail that it literally has overwhelmed the story, and turned into a travelogue of his fantasy world. As had been mentioned, an editor is unnecessary because people will buy whatever he writes, but it doesn't mean that those books couldn't be better.

I'll shut up now, before I've entirely become an example of my own point.
 
 
The Return Of Rothkoid
02:30 / 06.12.05
As someone who's worked as a writer, sub and editor, variously, for all my working life, it's good to read posts where the process of putting together something for publication is explained well.

The biggest point I'd make is one that's been made earlier: there's a big difference between writing for a masthead, and writing for your own godhead. The latter needs to be handled with a bit more subtlety, but the former is pretty much just a job, and as such, is open to occasionally harsh criticism - as most jobs are. From experience, though, I know it's often difficult to convince some writers that writing a brief spot for mass-market publishing isn't, you know, something that'll be honoured by our children's children's children.

My thought with editing of my own copy is this: no matter how many times I've read something, one more read-through will almost always yield something dubious. A lot of freelancers I've seen tend to just shoot something in once they've finished it, under the impression that it's perfect, and it usually isn't.

Further, I'd say that it should be accepted that any writer isn't going to catch all of their mistakes - simply because if you recognised them as mistakes off the bat, you wouldn't put them in there in the first place. It's why there's often a couple of pairs of eyes cast over stuff at the copy stage - because things that're blindingly obvious to some are not quite so visible to others.
 
  
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