My blog Kindle Mystery, kindlemystery.blogspot.com, is receiving a lot of traffic. I have decided to collapse my blogging on editing into it. So this blog will have no more posts on it. I hope those of you who have followed it in one way or another will continue your loyalty by checking out Kindle Mystery.

Take care.

J.P.

When Should an Editor Just Ask Questions?

The degree of authority evaluative editors take on varies from project to project. Some clients want them to offer a virtual rewrite of the book. Other clients expect a much lighter hand. Most lie in between.

Often, these expectations are left unstated. That’s not surprising. Most writers have little awareness of how other writers interact with editors.

An editor needs to ask tactful questions in order to discern the client’s specific desires. Examples include:

            •What is your prior experience with being edited?

            •How and where do you want to publish the manuscript?

            •Do you want me to help you get it published?

            •What do you want me to tell you about the manuscript to help you get it published?

            •Are you prepared for some possibly surprising observations?

If, after asking these questions, it becomes apparent that a writer has little experience with editors and would have a difficult time absorbing trenchant suggestions, an editor needs to use a light hand. In my experience, such a situation demands that we ask questions, not show the way.

We should offer the questions as things to think about. Some examples include:

            •What happens when you experiment with other points of view? different settings?

            •What are the major turning points in the plot? Do you feel you make them clear and dramatic?

            •Could some words be eliminated from this sentence? Would you like to rework it?

These examples are only the beginning of a very long list. And, for a specific manuscript, the questions would be unique to it.

In some ways, we editors need to be chameleons, figuring out our clients’ expectations, needs, and desires, and working accordingly.

Editing the Discussion of Controversial Topics

In a discussion with a friend the other day, he seemed to state that an editor has no business helping an author bring up sensitive social topics in ways that will not alienate a lot of readers. If I understood him correctly, he holds that it is the artist's job to do what she needs to, regardless of the consequences. What role an evaluative editor should play in this scenario he didn't make clear.

Perhaps he believes that evaluative editors get in the way of the writer's true articulation in ways that copy editors or proofreaders do not. He may feel that artistic creation should be left wholly individual.

I don't agree with this. My sense is that in one way or another almost all writing, including great writing, is collaborative. For instance, I think Shakespeare "wrote" his plays, but it seems reasonable to assume he got a lot of help from his fellow players in The King's Men.

When editors and writers collaborate on discussing social issues, it is the editor's job, I believe, to point out the possible consequences of certain choices. To do so, editors need to keep on top of current sensibilities and sensitivities in the social sphere. They need to negotiate between these public standards and a writer's individual artistic impulse.

On the one hand, neither editors nor writers want to strip a work of its uniqueness. Who would want to publish or review such a bland work? On the other hand, if the work unnecessarily steps on some toes, it will run into trouble in a variety of ways—from finding a publisher to getting reviewed. 

Writing is an irreducibly social act, with many people involved other than the person listed as an author. These include readers, editors at all sorts of levels, publishers, and reviewers. Another such group is other writers who think about or approach an issue in a different manner, thereby providing openings for alternative perspectives and angles.

Certainly, editors should not tell writers what to do. But they need to make writers fully cognizant of how certain choices may affect a large proportion of potential readers.

Editor & Creative Writer in Same Person: the Conflict

One of the worries I have about my editing is how it affects my own creative writing. An editor by definition must internalize and work with standardized language. As a creative writer, I need to get outside such standards, to develop some unique ways of manipulating and forming words and sentences. If the role of editor gets too deeply embedded in me, I will not be able to think and create outside of its narrow confines.

What are some exercises I can do to prevent myself from losing my creative edge to standardization?

1. Write prose without punctuation. Doing this exercise helps me to see various ways of organizing language in addition to the standard one. New ways to use sentence fragments might suggest themselves. Unusual and useful syntax (word order) might reveal itself. New rhythms and polyrhythms might appear.

2. Write sentences vertically, one word on top of another. Isolating words in this way helps me to hear the sound of each, see the look of each, and ascertain the assumptions behind word order. The latter occurs because the exercise creates an easy way to shift words around, from one level to another, to observe the way meaning shades and alters. 

3. Use various games derived from the work of the OULIPO poets, among others. Here's one example: I open a novel; note the part of speech of the first word; look it up in the dictionary; and go down from it to the next word that is the same part of speech, which I write down and then work through a number of words, perhaps 20. Finally, I  connect these words through phrases and sentences. This exercise forces me to work with words outside my typical vocabulary. Doing so breaks up some of the ingrained habits formed by editing.

4. Tap the subconscious. I pick out an image, any image, in a poem. Then, before thinking at all, I write down an image of my own. I repeat this several times. Then I connect my images (not the originals) with phrases and sentences. I don't worry about being "true" to the subconscious source of the language. Rather, I attend to how I can turn the raw material found there into new ways of forming images, phrases, and sentences.

These are just a few examples. In each, the goal is the same: to provide a gentle shock to the editor's staid linguistic habits.

For editors who are not creative writers, doing these exercises may help them develop empathy for creative writers and their processes of composition.

Shifting Parameters: Editing Genre and Experimental Writing

Shifting Parameters: Editing Genre and Experimental Writing

Recently, I had the privilege of editing a fantasy novel. The job, it turned out, was fairly easy: I had to make suggestions about the delineation of characters, creation of vivid scenes, and formation of quality sentences.

Why was this job easy? Because it involved a genre novel which conforms to clearly defined characteristics. The novel's very category provided me with parameters for editing. What are the expectations of fantasy? The characters need to seem larger than life and involved in epic-like dramas.  The scenes need to convey intense drama and action. And the sentences need to be clear and plainly written.

Next, I edited an experimental, mixed-genre manuscript, and all parameters went by the wayside. In fact, experimental literature by definition is writing in search of parameters, writing that establishes its own particular forms and means of approach. Sometimes, experimental writers, as did the author I was working with, even play with grammatical and spelling norms. At the level of proofreading, I needed to discuss with her whether or not some misspellings were intentional.

How is an editor to approach such a work? The only answer I can come up with is through empathy (See my post On Editing: a Dialogue Between Evaluation and Empathy on this blog.) My approach was to read through the manuscript once simply to catch on to the norms, forms, and expectations she was establishing. While I do something like this with all manuscripts, only in mixed-genre or avant-garde work does the first read-through involve trying to understand how this writing asks to be read.

In such a situation, I rely less on traditional editorial apparatus—the publicly accepted rules and expectations for good writing—and more on instinct and aesthetic taste. My feel for the piece of writing, and my feel for language in general, must be in deep accord with the author's. For instance, I can't just learn that she desires a certain "misspelling"; I need to understand why she wants it and how it partakes in her larger writerly palette.

The difference between editing genre work as opposed to experimental writing comes down to degrees. In genre work, editors are much more involved in honing the final product for public display.

Editors of experimental work are more involved in working with the writer to realize an artistic vision. Editors act as sounding boards rather than skilled and knowledgeable conventional language workers. This distinction is not, of course, absolute. Genre editors get involved with artistic vision, but not to the extent they do with experimental works.

As a general activity, the goal of editing in both works remained the same—to help make writing sing—but the feel of the work I did differed greatly.

Editor's Questions For Novelist, Part 2

Point of View

Is the story best told from first person? If so, should the major character or a minor one tell it?

Is the story best told from the third person? If so, what sort of third person? limited to the perspective of one character? omniscient? merely reporting facts with no description of the inner life of any character?

Should the story vacillate between a first person and a third person point of view? Should it vacillate between various third person or first person perspectives?

What do you learn when you rewrite a scene from various points of view? Can this exercise help you even after you have settled on a point of view?

Paragraphs

What is the purpose of this paragraph? to focus on a description, idea, or feeling? or to provide consistent rhythm? In either case, does it fulfill its purpose?

What do you gain by leaving this as a short paragraph? this one long? this one medium?

What is extraneous? What needs developing?

Should these paragraphs be combined? Should this paragraph be separated into two, with each one further developed?

What is gained by this particular paragraph break? lost?

Words

Are you using this word correctly?

What is the most appropriate word?

What word might work better?

What is the connotation and denotation of this word? Are they consistent with the way you are trying to use it?

Editor's Questions for Novelist, Part 1

Scenes
How do you visualize this scene taking place? Are your images consistent with this vision? Do your images ask you to alter your vision?

What are the minimum number of characters necessary to make this scene work?

What is at the center of the scene—actions, ideas, interior thoughts, or something else? Are they contributing to setting, plot, characterization, or something else? How? On the basis of the answers to these questions, what should be changed, dropped or enhanced?

How does writing style contribute to the scene? Are your figures of speech relevant and coherent? Are your word choices consistent with your overall design?

Sentences
Why did you make this a long sentence? Why did you make this a short sentence? Why did you make this a sentence of medium length? What do the lengths of specifics sentence contribute to a scene?

What do you intend with this sentence? Is it what you technically say?

What is the true verb of this sentence? Do you make it the grammatical verb? Did you place the verb in the most effective place?

Character
What expressions and word choices in a specific character's dialogue are consistent with and develop that character?

Are your characters delineated not only by how they speak, but by their characteristic actions, habits, feelings, movements, and ways of thinking? Do characters help to develop each other by offering opinions about each other, behaving in specific ways toward each other, and talking to each other in specific ways?

Plot
What question animates the main plot? What question animates each of the subplots?

As the book unfolds, what other questions are introduced to supplement the main one? How well do they work?

Setting
What are the benefits of the book's historical setting? the drawbacks? Is it the most effective one? Are the details and scenes described consistent with that moment in history?

What are the benefits and drawbacks of the novel's physical setting?

This could go on, of course. But I hope I've developed some suggestions for both editors and novelists.