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A Chicago area girl born and bred, I've lived in Mississippi, Montana, Michigan, and...ten years in the wilds of northeastern Indiana, where I fought the noble fight as a book editor. Now, I'm back in Illinois once more...for good. (At least I intend to make it that way!)
Showing posts with label getting it right. Show all posts
Showing posts with label getting it right. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

The Editor Is Your Friend. No, Really: Part 3.

Last time in this editor discussion, we'd just finished talking about what to be aware of, stay away from, or at least carefully and WARILY question when it comes to the editing biz.
So now, out of the good, the bad, and the ugly...we're gonna talk about the GOOD.

A good editor is...

1. Competent in the language.
A good editor MUST have command of the English language, at least. Some editors are multi-lingual, but I'm here to tell you that (fortunately) that's not required. (Thank heaven!) And, frankly, knowing English well is probably enough to ask of your editor, anyway...because so few of them do.

Do you doubt this? Then how many times have you seen copy that...
...has a plural formed with an apostrophe?

...has a word usage error (as in, say,  affect versus effect or metal versus mettle--among dozens of others)?

...has disagreement of subject and verb numbers (singular subject, plural verb, or vice versa)? 

Don't laugh. This happens far more often than most people realize, for a couple of reasons. 
First, sheer sloppiness. Something that's actually WRONG gets used so many times that it starts to sound correct to the ear. That's how we get sentences like "Every child should know their address and phone number."  Uh-yup. (Every child, actually, should know that that sentence is incorrect!)

Second, words that look singular and are actually plural...or plural and look singular. MEDIA, for example, is plural, while STAFF is singular. So if you say, "Our staff look after you with tender loving care," or "The media is a big problem"...guess what. (!) 

The reason you see these and multiple other egregious errors is because, in fact, so few people calling themselves "editors" nowadays actually know the language very well. This is no accident: they're products of an educational system that, some years ago, threw out grammar and phonics in favor of...well, whatever in the world they were in favor of. Spelling? Who needs it? Just spell the way you feel. Grammar? That's just dull, boring, and stifling. Word usage? That's the stuff of picky people!

So...editors many times don't know that they don't know something
Which wouldn't be so bad if they looked things up just to be SURE.
This brings us into the second thing a good editor needs to be:

2. Humble. 
I can see your jaws dropping now. "Humble? Doesn't an editor have to have confidence in her own ability? Why would I want a guy who's HUMBLE editing my stuff? I want my editors to know what they're doing and believe in themselves!"

Well, there you have it. Yet more proof positive of how little many of us know the language. Because none of those objections has anything to do with humility.

So what DO we mean by an editor being "humble"?

A humble editor isn't one who denigrates him/herself. It isn't an editor who lacks confidence, or one who's unsure about what he or she can bring to the table, skill-wise. 
What humility IS in an editor is what we might call "teachability."
It's knowing one's limits.

A humble editor, in short, knows that s/he doesn't know everything there is to know. Not about the language, to begin with--but certainly not about everything else in the world.

This is a bitter pill for many of us to swallow, for many reasons--not the least of which is, if we've paid our dues in the world, we DO pick up a cornucopia of "stuff" along the way. 
Facts. Figures. Proportions. Odds. Specific terminology and jargon. The inner workings of clocks, or radios, or cars, or amoebas, or piano actions, or tiger lilies, or welding torches. Illnesses and their symptoms. Speed and trajectory. Recipes. The proper way to do a backstroke. And so on. And so on.

Yep. We do pick up collections of all kinds of semi-useful stuff, don't we?
But in the process, we also pick up...mistakes. Or misinformation. Or misconceptions.

Some of that's not through our own fault. Especially in the case of historical information, as any student of history will tell you, sometimes what's "factual" depends on who's writing the text!

But even allowing for that gremlin now and again, in the end, one of the most valuable attributes an editor has is the insatiable urge to GET IT RIGHT.
Which means LOOKING IT UP...sometimes in several different places.
And which also means LOOKING IT UP...even if you're fairly sure about it. 
That's what we mean by editorial humility.

Let's repeat that.
A humble editor has learned just enough to know that s/he doesn't know everything. So one of the most valuable things he or she can "know" is what he or she doesn't "know"...for sure.
And one of the most valuable traits he or she can have, then, is the need to GET IT RIGHT.
No matter how small the detail may be, or how "sure" an editor is that s/he already knows it.

I'm a crackerjack speller, yet there are still words I have to look up. There are words I've only recently learned I may have been misspelling. You may wonder how that can be: it's simple. The people around me can't spell any better than I can, so they take my word for it!
:-)

All kidding aside, however, do look for an editor who is humble, in the sense that he or she knows that all editors have limitations. Look for an editor who's willing to be taught (some of us do it kicking and screaming, but we CAN do it). Look for an editor who'll query your stuff along the lines of saying, "Are you sure? What's your source for this?" rather than saying, "This is wrong. This would never happen." Because if there's one thing that good editors learn over the years, it's that pretty much anything can happen on this good earth, given the right circumstances, characters, background, and setting. If you're an expert in something I'm not, I'm more than willing to let you teach me about it.

Just don't mess with the grammar...because there, nine times out of ten, I'll getcha. :-)

We'll talk about more aspects of GOOD editing in the next installment. Don't worry; there aren't many more important than these two we've just listed: confidence and competence in the language, and enough humility to make SURE that together, the editor is  working with an author to GET IT RIGHT. 

Stay tuned for the rest of the story in part 4!

Janny

Friday, March 19, 2010

Credibility: Shot.

I started to read a book today…put it down immediately…and I’m not sure I’ll pick it up again.
I was barely two pages into the thing, and it’s a book that, by many accounts, is terrific.

The book is James Scott Bell’s DEADLOCK*. It opens with a compelling scene, involving a 16-year-old who is obviously contemplating suicide. Yep. Strong stuff. And pretty well told from a 16-year-old’s mindset, too, all things considered.

Until I hit the line, “…that song her mama used to sing to her, about that girl named Billie Joe who jumped off a bridge.”

And I said, “Oh, for crying out loud!” and set it aside.
Why?

 
This is clearly a reference to a song that a person of my generation (and hence, this girl’s mama’s generation) would know: Ode to Billie Joe. Bobbie Gentry. 1967. I remember it well. I turned 15 that summer, and the disk jockeys went nuts over that song the first time they played it. It zoomed to the #1 most requested song that night and stayed there for an impressive amount of time. It was a huge national hit. It spawned not only a novelization, but a movie…because it was a song that posed a lot of questions and didn’t answer all of them—thus allowing for all kinds of creative license.

But the one question it did answer, and the one this author got wrong, was who Billie Joe was. Billie Joe McAllister was a boy. The girl,who told the tale of his suicide, was the one narrating the ode. But she didn’t jump off any bridges. Not even once.

And anyone who had more than a nodding acquaintance with this song would have known that.

So if you’re going to use a cultural reference like this, the very least you can do is get it right.

I can hear the protests now. “But, Janny, this book was published in 2002! That’s a long time from when this song was popular! Maybe the character just got it wrong!"

Uhh…no. Her mama used to sing it to her all the time, remember? If your mama sings you a song that often, the very least you know is if the main character is a boy or a girl. And if it’s something you’re remembering at a desperate point in your life, it’s already part of your DNA. You know the thing inside and out.

Unfortunately, the author didn’t. And his editor didn’t. And the moment that became obvious, he shattered his credibility with me.

Harsh? Too picky? I don’t think so. Not within the first few pages of a book. The place where you’re trying to reel in a reader. To get her so involved in the scene and in your story that she can’t put the book down.

In other words, this is a lethal place to make a mistake.

Readers can be very forgiving people. Readers who are also writers can be even more forgiving. We know how hard it can be to construct worlds, to spin spells, to craft a compelling read, and little things here and there don’t bother us. Even I’ll forgive an author a minor gaffe if I’m well into the book, buying the premise, and involved with the characters’ lives.

But I’m not there within the first few pages.

I’m not involved with anyone yet at that point. I don’t know this author, I don’t know his people, and I don’t know—because he hasn’t yet convinced me—that I should believe him. Hence, when he makes a mistake that is easily corrected right at the beginning of his story, he's got me wondering already—not about his characters, but about him. About whether he was misinformed, or just lazy. And mostly, about whether I can trust anything else he says.

There are a couple of lessons here.

One, of course, is to avoid any obvious cultural references. Often, this is the advice that’s safest to follow—because it avoids the problem of “dating” the work, and/or rendering lots of what might be really good lines ineffective because another audience, in another time and place, won’t “get” them.

The second one is, if you’re going to use a cultural reference—and by that, I mean a song, a movie, a TV show, a character in a book or play, or even a brand name product or a real street in a real town—you need to be absolutely fanatical about getting it right.

This means you don’t trust the first source you go to, either. You back up the source with three or four others, if you’re smart. If you really want to get the lay of the land, you go there yourself, you walk the street, and you talk to the natives. You watch that play or that TV show or that movie and make sure the line you quote is actually in it. You listen to the song—or at least read the lyrics.

Above all, you never assume you “know” it.

And never assume your editor “knows” it, either. Because more than one author has had something right in a manuscript and had a well-meaning editor change it so it’s actually wrong.

Have your ducks in a row. Period.
And if you can’t be sure of a cultural reference—maybe think about changing it to something you make up. No one faults writers who make up fake towns, fake streets, and fake TV shows. If anything, that shows you’ve got the extra little bit of creativity to truly build an entire world. And even if most people who know you also know what real town you’re talking about…that part doesn’t matter. Because in the end, it’s all fiction, you can’t make a mistake unless you forget your own details…but that’s a whole ‘nuther problem, one that’s solved with a tad more organization. :-)

Unfortunately, screwing up a cultural reference as popular as this one isn’t so easily fixed.

I don’t know if I’m going back to that book, or that author.
So don’t let this happen to you.
I’d hate to leave a horking good story on the shelf simply because you lost me at “hello."

*And yes, I could have omitted the real author’s name and the real book name…but there’s no point to anonymity, is there? It doesn't help a reader. So don’t give me grief about it.

Thoughts?
Janny