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Source: (consider it) Thread: Editors (not predators)
Lamb Chopped
Ship's kebab
# 5528

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(... and yes, I know about that site, thank you, the pun was too good to resist).

This is a carry over from the great books we love to hate thread, since apparently a lot of us are editors / hate editors / love editors (for other people, that is), and so forth.

I'll nail my colors to the fence. I'm both a writer and editor (see book in sig below for proof of the first; see trail of bleeding victims leaving my doorstep for the second).

Any more of us out there? Any other writers you'd like to inflict us on? Oh, and how the hell are editors supposed to get any training or experience if the publishers are starting to get rid of them, as someone said on that thread? I already know the proofreaders are toast...

[ 06. December 2014, 22:23: Message edited by: Lamb Chopped ]

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Er, this is what I've been up to (book).
Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down!

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Kelly Alves

Bunny with an axe
# 2522

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Well, so far we have Stephen King, Victor Hugo, and J. K. Rowling in the dock.

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I cannot expect people to believe “
Jesus loves me, this I know” of they don’t believe “Kelly loves me, this I know.”
Kelly Alves, somewhere around 2003.

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Firenze

Ordinary decent pagan
# 619

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And you might want to read this interesting article on Shakespeare's editor ...
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Kelly Alves

Bunny with an axe
# 2522

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[Big Grin]

Why is it I imagine Shakespeare would be a real primadonna about the editing process?

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I cannot expect people to believe “
Jesus loves me, this I know” of they don’t believe “Kelly loves me, this I know.”
Kelly Alves, somewhere around 2003.

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Brenda Clough
Shipmate
# 18061

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Being an editor in trad publishing is a thankless task. I know many quite good editors who moved on to become agents, freelancers, or writers themselves.

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Science fiction and fantasy writer with a Patreon page

Posts: 6378 | From: Washington DC | Registered: Mar 2014  |  IP: Logged
Lamb Chopped
Ship's kebab
# 5528

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quote:
Originally posted by Firenze:
And you might want to read this interesting article on Shakespeare's editor ...

Okay, that author just annoys me. (yeah, say you're surprised)

First, he fails to pay attention to the fact that these are freaking PLAYS--that is, things meant to be spoken. Which means that the actors--who did NOT have a sense of the Shakespeare text as something holy and untouchable--are bound to have made any number of changes on the fly. And Shakespeare himself was a working playwright, very unlikely to have been precious about his exact words--chances are he made a shitload of his own changes as he saw how things worked out in practice. We know he had no particular care for the manuscripts--very few of these survive--most of them probably ended up as pie wrappers and such. He was certainly not sitting there twirling his mustache and cogitating about his literary brilliance. (You want to see a painfully literary playwright, try Ben Jonson. Shudder.)

Now, where the plays we have come from. Some of them come from various manuscripts--we might have player's scripts, for example, which would be more or less chopped about depending on what the director/producer wanted to do on that occasion. Which would depend on the wishes of the theatre owner and/or private person wanting the play put on. So, not much sacred there about the text.

Some of them (such as the referenced very, very different sources for Hamlet) are almost certainly memorial reconstructions. There was no such thing as copyright in those days, at least in the way we think of it (I think it was "first printer gets to claim it regardless of authorship" and even that was dodgy), so if someone could glom on to your company's manuscripts, they could rush to a printer and print the bloody thing--and away go your chances of making any money off it yourself. Which meant that if you had a new play, you locked the copies up as best you could; and your rivals would go sit in the playhouse and do their damndest to memorize what they could, or even use rudimentary shorthand, so they could circumvent you. Which is where they think that first quarto of Hamlet came from.

Now you can imagine the quality of some semi-memorized knock-off play rushed into print. And you'd be right. Bits (big and small) would be missing, uncommon hard-to-remember words would be replaced by common ones, syntax switched about, and so on. And screw spelling--that wasn't set in Shakespeare's day at all, so saying "but the spelling varies!" tells you sweet fuck-all unless you are trying to prove that one printed edition follows another one. The minute a spoken performance comes into it, spelling goes right out the window.

Finally, plays like Shakespeare's were simply not valued in the way they are today. Get an editor for them? Well, only if you have a collection of your deceased colleague's plays and in your opinion they are in lamentably rough shape and need a clean-up. Which possibly could have happened with the 1628 First Folio. But by and large, no, no editors for plays. Certainly not editors intent on anything much more than hiding the worst of the embarrassments (missing acts or scenes, major lack of continuity, political indiscretions). Literary editors would look for something more highbrow to spend their effort on.

Thus endeth the rant.

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Er, this is what I've been up to (book).
Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down!

Posts: 20059 | From: off in left field somewhere | Registered: Feb 2004  |  IP: Logged
Lamb Chopped
Ship's kebab
# 5528

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[Waterworks] tell me I didn't kill the thread now? [Waterworks]

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Er, this is what I've been up to (book).
Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down!

Posts: 20059 | From: off in left field somewhere | Registered: Feb 2004  |  IP: Logged
Brenda Clough
Shipmate
# 18061

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Where I was going, with my clumsy trying-on-swimsuits analogy over on the other thread, was that a writer needs precisely the right editor. Tough, but not too tough. Able to get through the writer armor that is necessary for writers to function. the goal is to make the work better, and if the editor can convince the writer that this is the plan that is the ideal state of affairs.

A good editor's job is to ask me questions that I had not known I was asking about the work. And once the questions are articulated I can usually answer them -- that's my part of the job.

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Science fiction and fantasy writer with a Patreon page

Posts: 6378 | From: Washington DC | Registered: Mar 2014  |  IP: Logged
Lamb Chopped
Ship's kebab
# 5528

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I had a book a while ago where do what I could, I could not convince the author that the central image was... inappropriate. (I wasn't the only one to think so)

Since he was paying me to edit, I said what I had to in order to be straight with him, and when he rejected the data, I shut up.

It's all you can do.

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Er, this is what I've been up to (book).
Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down!

Posts: 20059 | From: off in left field somewhere | Registered: Feb 2004  |  IP: Logged
Brenda Clough
Shipmate
# 18061

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The editor of How Like A God objected to the verb 'troll'. This was some years ago, and at that point in time there were only two, not three meanings of the word. You could have the noun: the large and aggressive creature that either lives under bridges or is in the early part of The Hobbit. Or the verb referred to a method of fishing. She only knew the first meaning (these New York City women!).
I happened to have on hand a catalog of fishing and trolling equipment. I gave serious thought to sending her a copy. However, suddenly the idea of a real troll, the noun, became possible. I had a bridge right there to hand. So I rewrote the ending to get a noun troll in, and it was fine.

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Science fiction and fantasy writer with a Patreon page

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lilBuddha
Shipmate
# 14333

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A good editor can make the difference between a bad work and a good work, a good work and one for the ages.
This is such a simple and obvious reality that it amazes me anyone questions it.
Success can mess this up. As long as enough punters will pay, no one backing the creatives care if the work is the best it can be.
Some creatives will care, but even this is problematic. Comfort and ego mask quite a bit.
Books by successful authors are often like the director's cut of a movie. Rarely as good as they could be, almost never as good as the edited version.

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I put on my rockin' shoes in the morning
Hallellou, hallellou

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Palimpsest
Shipmate
# 16772

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Editors usually make things better. They're underappreciated, and in the decay of Civilization and the rise of author controlled publishing they're going the way of the moa and the dodo, so it isn't worth complaining about the minor flaws of some editors.

I remember when the New York Times got rid of hot metal and got rid of the linotype operators that had entered all the copy for the previous century in favor of using what the journalists and editors keyed in. Typos, misspellings and grammatical errors increased and it took years for the quality to come back. It turns out that those operators were quietly fixing most of the errors. It's not clear if it was their official job or something they did out of boredom or pride.
Gradually the "creative" side of the operation realized they had lost their safety net and the quality of the text in the paper improved. I suspect the same thing will happen once there aren't editors in the process by default. I can see it becoming flipped, where successful writers insist that the money be paid to have a competent copywriter review the book.

I went to a science fiction book reading this summer with Hirome Goto. I bought a Canadian published juvenile and asked for her autograph as the last in a long line of people asking for books to be signed. She said a few pleasant words, sighed and then made about 5 corrections in pen where the editor had offended her.
I've heard that PEN is doing fundraising book auctions where the authors have annotated and corrected the book by hand. That may be the future.

[ 09. December 2014, 04:30: Message edited by: Palimpsest ]

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Lord Jestocost
Shipmate
# 12909

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An example of not enough editing: a friend wrote a New Adventures of Doctor Who novel, in which the Doctor gets abducted by alien nasties. The companion follows their tracks in the ground.

Or maybe it was the companion who got abducted. Either way ... the alien nasties actually flew, so could not have left any tracks for anyone to follow, which no one noticed until after publication.

An example of too much editing: I wrote an sf novel and a helpful copy editor changed every mention of the starship's attitude thrusters to its altitude thrusters. I helpfully changed it back again at proof stage.

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Amanda B. Reckondwythe

Dressed for Church
# 5521

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quote:
Originally posted by Lord Jestocost:
the alien nasties actually flew, so could not have left any tracks for anyone to follow

They could have left a trail of droppings on the ground. Depends on what they had for lunch, I guess. [Ultra confused]

[Miss Amanda will put up her blue pencil and get her wrap.]

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"I take prayer too seriously to use it as an excuse for avoiding work and responsibility." -- The Revd Martin Luther King Jr.

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Trudy Scrumptious

BBE Shieldmaiden
# 5647

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I have been on both sides of the editing process and have great respect for the job of editor. One thing I've learned is that no matter how good the editor is, some detail will always slip past. In one of my novels I killed the same minor character twice and NOBODY noticed (including me, until it was in print when of course it jumped off the page). This will always stand out to me as my biggest editing failure.

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Books and things.

I lied. There are no things. Just books.

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lilBuddha
Shipmate
# 14333

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quote:
Originally posted by Palimpsest:

Gradually the "creative" side of the operation realized they had lost their safety net and the quality of the text in the paper improved. I suspect the same thing will happen once there aren't editors in the process by default.

I don't. Editing is a seperate skill that not all authors have, for one. Even when they do, editing is typically better done by a seperate person.
An author is often too close to the work to see the whole.
The author knows what they are trying to communicate, thus is not always the best to notice what they have missed.
Ever read a repair manual? It is not uncommon to find missed steps or references to things unexplained. In the author's mind, the step has been listed, but never made it to paper.

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I put on my rockin' shoes in the morning
Hallellou, hallellou

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Gwai
Shipmate
# 11076

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What lilbuddha said. I also write and edit, and it takes me months of distance to be able to do even some proper editing of my own work. Even then I am coming from the point of view of an extremely sympathetic audience, who understands the author. Though that's partially what first readers are for in my life. Stephen King's book on writing (only book of his I've read, so I don't know his fiction) has a lovely way of describing the concept of a first reader. They're the audience you truly write for. If they understand it, get it, or not, that's what matters. Of course you have to pick a first reader who's in tune enough with the rest of the world that their opinion is useful...

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A master of men was the Goodly Fere,
A mate of the wind and sea.
If they think they ha’ slain our Goodly Fere
They are fools eternally.


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Brenda Clough
Shipmate
# 18061

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Exactly right. You need someone to look at you in the swimsuit in exactly the right way. Not blind with love, but not mean.

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Science fiction and fantasy writer with a Patreon page

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Stercus Tauri
Shipmate
# 16668

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Dangerous territory...

Our younger daughter is a non-fiction editor for a big publisher. Her job is to make a semi-literate ignoramus look like a writer, and she's very good at it; a merciless fact-checker and a good writer.

I, on the other hand, am driven to the occasional frenzy by uncomprehending philistine editors who fail to understand the structure of my piece, who have no sense of humour, and who excise the finest prose for which I wish to be remembered. That is the price of getting published.

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Thay haif said. Quhat say thay, Lat thame say (George Keith, 5th Earl Marischal)

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Moo

Ship's tough old bird
# 107

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quote:
Originally posted by Stercus Tauri:
I, on the other hand, am driven to the occasional frenzy by uncomprehending philistine editors who fail to understand the structure of my piece, who have no sense of humour, and who excise the finest prose for which I wish to be remembered.

One of George Orwell's rules for writers is that if you consider something you have written to be particularly good, you should strike it out.

OTOH, when he was in school purple prose was much admired, and he had a lot to unlearn. He did it very well.

Moo

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Kerygmania host
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See you later, alligator.

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Stercus Tauri
Shipmate
# 16668

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quote:
Originally posted by Moo:
quote:
Originally posted by Stercus Tauri:
I, on the other hand, am driven to the occasional frenzy by uncomprehending philistine editors who fail to understand the structure of my piece, who have no sense of humour, and who excise the finest prose for which I wish to be remembered.

One of George Orwell's rules for writers is that if you consider something you have written to be particularly good, you should strike it out.

OTOH, when he was in school purple prose was much admired, and he had a lot to unlearn. He did it very well.

Moo

I know, I know, and I like Orwell. I also remember, every time anything of mine gets savaged, of Truman Capote's magnificent insult directed at Jack Kerouac: "That's not writing; that's typing". I do a lot of typing.

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Thay haif said. Quhat say thay, Lat thame say (George Keith, 5th Earl Marischal)

Posts: 905 | From: On the traditional lands of the Six Nations. | Registered: Sep 2011  |  IP: Logged


 
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