Mny of us are bettter editors than the pros

[Wifetheif]

I try to edit my own stories. Sometimes I do a good jobs, sometimes I miss obvious howlers. I've also edit some novels for professional writers some of which have sold well I thought i was only so-so as an editor. The point is I put the effort in, especially with mty later stories. I thought I was at least middling to the task. THEN I READ Ernest Cline's best selling "Ready Player Two" it had a high profile "star" editor and was published by a major house. Cline has a sentence with the word "purple" repeated FIVE times! Another sentence uses "suddenly" THREE times. Cline uses "Suddenly and without warning" unironically. One of his sentences has this bridge "even though and even though" yes, he uses both past tense and present tense in the same sentence. Cline's text is full of preposition and passive voice overload. Why even edit the book if your are not even going to do basic blue penciling? In all seriousness, an A.I. editor would have turned out a tighter MS than the one Cline delivered. As I said, I've edited several books for other authors, some of which have sold well. Never have I encountered a MS as badly written as Cline's FINAL Result! I'm clearly a better editor than Cline's high paid superstar editor. Why do I need a professional editor when books as bad as "Ready Player Two" exist in the wild? rom interviews published online. Cline's editor sees his role more as a cheerleader for his writers than a task master. Fine! Then don't call yourself an "editor!" Seriously folks most of us are a lot better at this than we think!

 

[PennyThompson]

*Many

 

[SugarStorm]

Getting three "suddenly" in one sentence is tricky. It's kind of clunky, but my try:

Suddenly, the lights went out; suddenly, the room fell silent; and suddenly, everyone realized they weren’t alone.

 

[Wifetheif]

Getting three "suddenly" in one sentence is tricky. It's kind of clunky, but my try:

Suddenly, the lights went out; suddenly, the room fell silent; and suddenly, everyone realized they weren’t alone.

That. better than how Cline handled it! his was along the lines of Suddenly there was a disturbance that suddenly changed the acoustics quite suddenly" I'm not joking! Cline is a simply rancid writer.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

When you have a certain level of success with past works, you get to tell your editor to fuck off, that's how I wrote it and no one cares.

 

[Wifetheif]

When you have a certain level of success with past works, you get to tell your editor to fuck off, that's how I wrote it and no one cares.

Yet, Cline praises the editor for his input and support in his acknowledgements so clearly there was a back and forth.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

Yet, Cline praises the editor for his input and support in his acknowledgements so clearly there was a back and forth.

Or it's just an obligatory jerking off...
I agree the editing is terrible.

 

[MrPixel]

...blue penciling...

???

Editors in my pro experience used red. I still do. Blue, or technically, non-repro blue, was what was used for markups on camera-ready copy. That was after typesetting where the editing notes wouldn't interfere with small corrections handled with paste-up.

 

[TheLobster]

If you repeat the same word five times in a sentence, you are clearly going for some kind of effect. The attempt may fall flat, as I imagine it had in Cline's case, but I'd have serious doubts that it has simply been overlooked by the editor.

 

[IWroteThis]

Why do I need a professional editor

In my experience doing self editing, I find that the reason is the one you already stated.

sometimes I miss obvious howlers.

It tends to be a lot easier to notice mistakes in somebody else's story than our own.

Still, I think the best takeaway from your post is that it's more important to find the right editor than it is to just find an editor . . . and that's my excuse for not having an editor.

 

[AG31]

I try to edit my own stories. Sometimes I do a good jobs, sometimes I miss obvious howlers. I've also edit some novels for professional writers some of which have sold well I thought i was only so-so as an editor. The point is I put the effort in, especially with mty later stories. I thought I was at least middling to the task. THEN I READ Ernest Cline's best selling "Ready Player Two" it had a high profile "star" editor and was published by a major house. Cline has a sentence with the word "purple" repeated FIVE times! Another sentence uses "suddenly" THREE times. Cline uses "Suddenly and without warning" unironically. One of his sentences has this bridge "even though and even though" yes, he uses both past tense and present tense in the same sentence. Cline's text is full of preposition and passive voice overload. Why even edit the book if your are not even going to do basic blue penciling? In all seriousness, an A.I. editor would have turned out a tighter MS than the one Cline delivered. As I said, I've edited several books for other authors, some of which have sold well. Never have I encountered a MS as badly written as Cline's FINAL Result! I'm clearly a better editor than Cline's high paid superstar editor. Why do I need a professional editor when books as bad as "Ready Player Two" exist in the wild? rom interviews published online. Cline's editor sees his role more as a cheerleader for his writers than a task master. Fine! Then don't call yourself an "editor!" Seriously folks most of us are a lot better at this than we think!

Just curious, how do you know who his editor is?

I've seen an appalling number of awful books, many written by anonymous successors to retired writers of great series, but I can't say I've seen any failures of copy editing like what you cite here.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

If only your very post didn't contradict your claim...

 

[Kumquatqueen]

You don't know how bad it was before the editor got hold of it...

And how often they were told "I did that on purpose".

 

[SouthernCrossfire]

I always do a "post-publication" read on each of my stories and almost invariably find something (and usually several somethings) that I missed. Today I found a missing "wore" and "went" in my Halloween story, so I've updated the original manuscript for when a reader points out something REALLY wrong that I missed and I have to submit an edit.

Yes, that's happened before.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

I always do a "post-publication" read on each of my stories and almost invariably find something (and usually several somethings) that I missed. Today I found a missing "wore" and "went" in my Halloween story, so I've updated the original manuscript for when a reader points out something REALLY wrong that I missed and I have to submit an edit.

Yes, that's happened before.

My superpower is finding typos after I press submit.

 

[MrPixel]

My superpower is finding typos after I press submit.

No shit.

I am again reading a 15K-word story I thought was finished two days ago. This will be at least the fourth time for a full re-read, and that discounts the - at least - two dozen times for sections of concern. Now it's at the point where I'm not finding errors, or they're not jumping out at me, but I keep tweaking things. Like, "is this word more effective", "oh, a small NIP scene here would be fun, or "I used that word two paragraphs ago. Find another one."

It's the whole angst thing of an artist who just can't leave the portrait alone, and needs to call it done!

 

[StillStunned]

Speaking as a pro: I highly doubt it. Pros have training, they have experience, and they spend years doing nothing but thinking about the best way to phrase prose.

That said, sloppy proofreading and editing have crept into mainstream publishing. Typos have always existed, and the cheaper the publication the worse they've always been. Nowadays though editing and proofreading have come to be seen as an obligation rather than steps that add value, which is why there's more and more pressure on the cost and timing.

Another factor is people's opinion of their own writing skills. Editors and proofreaders are handed texts that haven't undergone any revision by the author, and they're expected to "just clean up a few typos". At a certain point you're correcting almost every word and rewriting every sentence just to make it readable. The author is generally happy, but ideally they'd send it back for a second pass after they've processed the edits. If they don't, chances are that the text still won't be perfect.

 

[MrPixel]

sloppy proofreading and editing have crept into mainstream publishing.

Oh, that downhill slope started in the 1980s. The typesetting shop I managed was contained within a large printing plant, and my bosses thought the end-all was spell-checking software. They started firing proofreaders from under me, reducing proofing staff from 6 to 2. Considering that the majority of our business were SEC registration documents - legally-binding publications - the burden on the shop was overwhelming.

True, learned proofreading is by and large a lost art at best. It's rare that I find typos in The New York Times, but even that paragon of journalistic virtue is showing cracks.

As a funny/not funny footnote, my wife, a commercial graphic artist, was fired from her short-lived job at the local newspaper because she dared to take the time to proofread copy. On the very rare occasion I peruse the paper either in print or online, the typos in their quantity and severity are astounding... and pathetic. "Professionals" my ass.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

I saw this sentence in a story today, and I immediately thought of this topic.

For it was the sound of her tying the last of my four limbs to her four corner bedposts, of securing my body, in a manner that I would not be allowed to escape from, spread-eagled to her furniture, ready for her to sexually ravish in any way that she chose, with me having absolutely no say in just how she intended to go about that now.

Now this author could really use an editor.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

I saw this sentence in a story today, and I immediately thought of this topic.

For it was the sound of her tying the last of my four limbs to her four corner bedposts, of securing my body, in a manner that I would not be allowed to escape from, spread-eagled to her furniture, ready for her to sexually ravish in any way that she chose, with me having absolutely no say in just how she intended to go about that now.

Now this author could really use an editor.

Yikes.

 

[crookedletter]

I feel like there was a similar screed against Ernest Cline and his hackery not so very long ago. Am I imagining that?

I won't spend a lot of breath defending Cline's literary talents, but I do feel like you know what you're getting into when you crack those books: they're either for you or they ain't.

It's interesting, though, how many typos or editing snafus I notice when I read a self-published novel or something out of a smaller house. It makes me kind of appreciate how good the pros actually are. Many of the big ones are not perfect, it's not uncommon to find a miss, but their relative rarity makes them all the more jarring.

Noticing how many of my own errors survive multiple proofreads and revisions just reinforces that writers need editors.

 

[TheLobster]

I saw this sentence in a story today, and I immediately thought of this topic.

For it was the sound of her tying the last of my four limbs to her four corner bedposts, of securing my body, in a manner that I would not be allowed to escape from, spread-eagled to her furniture, ready for her to sexually ravish in any way that she chose, with me having absolutely no say in just how she intended to go about that now.

 

[KittyOfSteele]

I saw this sentence in a story today, and I immediately thought of this topic.

For it was the sound of her tying the last of my four limbs to her four corner bedposts, of securing my body, in a manner that I would not be allowed to escape from, spread-eagled to her furniture, ready for her to sexually ravish in any way that she chose, with me having absolutely no say in just how she intended to go about that now.

Now this author could really use an editor.

I hope the narrator is a tentacle monster.

 

[Wifetheif]

Just curious, how do you know who his editor is?

I've seen an appalling number of awful books, many written by anonymous successors to retired writers of great series, but I can't say I've seen any failures of copy editing like what you cite here.

Julian Pavia responsible for all of Cline's books as well as the appalling "Artemis" by Any Weir.In both cases he was handed first time or second time published writers and did no intervention on their prose. Despite being paid big bucks to edit, he doesn't see it as his place to, you know ... actually chide his writers into improving their prose. I wish I could make big money doing the exact opposite of what I was hired to do.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

I hope the narrator is a tentacle monster.

I can't say that I went much beyond that marvelous sentence, but the narrator is a regular young man, I'm afraid.