I signed on to be a VE several months back. I’m primarily a writer, but editing one or two stories per week is helpful to me in improving my own writing.
As a writer I’ve had one or two problems with VEs, but have been very satisfied with my current relationship with my editor. It took a few attempts but I’ve found someone with whom I work well.
Good editing is hard work. I’ve received stories that were so insanely formatted that it took me over an hour to get them into a usable and readable format(hard line breaks drive me batty)…then another hour to dig through 2,000 word paragraphs, run on sentences, incomplete sentences, changes in voice and tense, glaring grammatical errors, misspellings that spell check would have caught, and so on.
So finally I get to a story I can actually read. Often the basic theme works, but the character development is weak, the visuals are lacking, the dialogue is stilted or even nonexistent, the plot is convoluted and the sex is unrealistic---or even preposterous. Depending on how weak the story is it can take me two or three hours, using the Word comment function, to truly edit the story line by line. Then it takes maybe another hour to provide an overall critique which isn’t crushing to the writer but provides valuable insights.
Often it would take far less time to simply rewrite the story but then it becomes my story and not the author’s and I’m not sure that that approach is constructive from a learning perspective.
Sometimes I just don’t like the theme; it’s not my kind of sex, I don’t like any of the characters or I can’t relate to the overall tone.
Having said all this I still enjoy editing stories with one big BUT: if you send me a very weak story and I spend half a day doing my job and then the next story you send me shows absolutely no improvement then I really don’t want to continue the editing relationship. I’m not here to make up for your disorganization or abject laziness as a writer.
The saddest thing I deal with is receiving a story that shows a complete lack of basic writing skills---let alone any real talent in writing narrative fiction. It’s particularly sad because the new writer obviously has a story to tell---maybe a story that needs to be told---but barely communicates at an elementary school level. An editor cannot replace glaring educational flaws.
As a writer I’ve had one or two problems with VEs, but have been very satisfied with my current relationship with my editor. It took a few attempts but I’ve found someone with whom I work well.
Good editing is hard work. I’ve received stories that were so insanely formatted that it took me over an hour to get them into a usable and readable format(hard line breaks drive me batty)…then another hour to dig through 2,000 word paragraphs, run on sentences, incomplete sentences, changes in voice and tense, glaring grammatical errors, misspellings that spell check would have caught, and so on.
So finally I get to a story I can actually read. Often the basic theme works, but the character development is weak, the visuals are lacking, the dialogue is stilted or even nonexistent, the plot is convoluted and the sex is unrealistic---or even preposterous. Depending on how weak the story is it can take me two or three hours, using the Word comment function, to truly edit the story line by line. Then it takes maybe another hour to provide an overall critique which isn’t crushing to the writer but provides valuable insights.
Often it would take far less time to simply rewrite the story but then it becomes my story and not the author’s and I’m not sure that that approach is constructive from a learning perspective.
Sometimes I just don’t like the theme; it’s not my kind of sex, I don’t like any of the characters or I can’t relate to the overall tone.
Having said all this I still enjoy editing stories with one big BUT: if you send me a very weak story and I spend half a day doing my job and then the next story you send me shows absolutely no improvement then I really don’t want to continue the editing relationship. I’m not here to make up for your disorganization or abject laziness as a writer.
The saddest thing I deal with is receiving a story that shows a complete lack of basic writing skills---let alone any real talent in writing narrative fiction. It’s particularly sad because the new writer obviously has a story to tell---maybe a story that needs to be told---but barely communicates at an elementary school level. An editor cannot replace glaring educational flaws.
