During a discussion on editing at our writer’s group, having listened to a reading of a first chapter, a blurb for a web page and some thoughts on how editing has an effect on your writing, we discovered some ideas that may help a beginning writer. It was a case of identifying style and the understanding of the language used.
Sometimes a missing letter changes everything
It emerged that what we thought was that the editors employed by any publishing house will of necessity reflect the required style of the house and edit text accordingly. It was also surmised that a good editor will recognise the writer’s style and advise him or her of the desirable need to either adapt their style to conform with the publishing house or to go elsewhere; the proviso being that the editor will be astute enough to recognise good writing and persuade the publishing house to support the writer anyway. The art of good writing is re-writing, as Joan Rosier Jones, a New Zealand author was so fond of saying and that means paying attention to the understanding of the language used and its structure, and the context of the tale you are telling. A historical tale will need a hint of the language of the time in which it is set and a modern story will need the modern idiom; the old should never try to write about the young in their own language unless they are writing of their youth and nobody likes a smart arse writing in dialect.
Naturally it is up to the writer to learn the craft, to edit as they write and to attempt to understand syntax, grammar, vocabulary and good spelling. A simple, clear, modern style is good providing that the other parts of writing, syntax, grammar and spelling, are attended to and the plot, character and subject of the story are also interesting. A skilled editor will advise the writer, and the emphasis is on advise, on what he or she needs to include and exclude to make sure the story meets the expectations of the reader.
The pitfalls are many and these can be easily recognised when doing a read through. The obvious ones are with characters who are too similar, names that are similar without a proper explanation or division, too much description, trite dialogue, very little action, sentences that plod (attention to syntax – sentence formation), wrong tense (grammar problems), poor spelling, lack of variety in the use of vocabulary and the worse mistake of all, telling the reader what is happening instead of showing them.
How do we avoid much of this before we present our precious work to an editor?
The answer is not a simple one. If we have worked on our script; that is we have done the spell checking, read through line by line and cut out all the unnecessary words, corrected the spelling, sorted the punctuation and we are sure that the story is told properly the way we want it we can then present it to scrutiny. A number of ways are offered: peers, that is our fellow writers, friends, family and when all that is done we can offer it to the publisher. What if the publisher is not that interested? It is time to pay a professional editor.
A professional editor will do what you need, will find the faults and recommend changes. You pay them to do it. You will get an unbiased assessment of your work and from there you can decide on the changes and publish if you wish. The same service with a publisher will have a bias and their recommendations may be in line with the house style. To be published in this way as a first time writer you will have to compromise.
Our discussion covered these points and we came to the conclusion that as each writer has their own style, as long as the mechanics, the syntax, grammar etc. are attended to it must be the editors task to advise and the writer’s objective to find a publishing house and editor sympathetic to their style. In other words the writer needs to match up the work with the publishing house. It follows that if you self-publish you market in the area that suits your subject and will recognise your style, although, naturally, you will need to make certain the writing is the best you can manage.
