22 Reasons Why Most Authors Need An Editor - Case in Point - Me!
by
Ivanka Di Felice
I wrote my book A Zany
Slice of Italy and thought it was darn near perfect! Then I met my editor…
It was a fortuitous encounter as I had no idea how to find a
suitable editor. I searched the net and asked five editors for a sample edit of
my story “Stranieri Giusti” (The
Right Type of Foreigners.) They all kindly obliged and sent me their work. I compared
the five edited versions and immediately felt that the editing done by Patricia
Waldygo stood out. While she was the best match, she was not the cheapest of
the five and at an original 120,000 words it was going to cost a lot to edit my
book. Regardless, I told her what I was looking for and how long my manuscript
was. She was willing to help me improve my manuscript prior to handing it off
to her, thus saving me money. She directed me to an article she had written on
her website www.desertsagebookeditor.comentitled "The Many Ways a Book Can Go Wrong" (or, 22 Reasons Every Author Needs
an Editor.) I poured over her advice and found that I was a culprit in 21 out
of 22 of the issues she mentions.
So I got to work. I worked really, really hard to try to follow her advice and to get my manuscript as good as I could before passing it on to her. I cut away 40,000 excess words without taking out any stories! That meant a huge savings in editing costs and for my readers, a more concise, lively read. Though I caught some of my mistakes, there were still plenty for Patricia to work with!
So I got to work. I worked really, really hard to try to follow her advice and to get my manuscript as good as I could before passing it on to her. I cut away 40,000 excess words without taking out any stories! That meant a huge savings in editing costs and for my readers, a more concise, lively read. Though I caught some of my mistakes, there were still plenty for Patricia to work with!
With permission from Patricia, I have copied below some of
the common mistakes that I (along with many other authors, so at least I am in
good company) committed.
1. Passive Voice
Passive voice can lend the stamp of authority to a statement and can also absolve the author of personal responsibility. In certain cases, this is effective: “Mistakes were made.” (Visualize an army general explaining why a smart bomb blew up the cookie factory.)
Yet most of the time, passive voice slows down the action and weakens the impact. Often, academic writers will craft an entire book predominantly in passive voice. That’s fine if they are aiming only for a scholarly market or are writing college textbooks, but most publishers of mass market books don’t want this. They usually instruct copy editors to change most passive verb tenses to make the book reader-friendly.
While writing, be on the lookout for an overuse of “is, was, were, am, are, will be, have been” and also “There is,” “There are,” “There was,” There were,” “It was,” and “It is.”
Use the following verb tenses only when absolutely necessary or in sentences where they actually sound better: for example, instead of “I am living on Maple Street,” write “I live on Maple Street.” Other examples of this verb tense are “I was living,” “they are living,” “we were living,” “he was running,” “she was asking,” and so on (in other words, pairing any verb with passive “is, am, was, were,” and so on).
It's fine to use these verb tenses occasionally, but if you find that 90 percent of your verbs are in this category, you've got a problem. Your book will sound flabby and, IMHO, a bit amateurish. As a first choice, use simple present or past tense wherever possible: “he ran,” “she asked,” “we live,” “we lived.”
(Now forgive me if I proceed to break this rule and put some of these book editing tips in passive voice. I need to invoke the voice of authority.)
Examples:
[Passive] Holes in my sandals were patched with chewing gum.
[Active] I used chewing gum to patch holes in my sandals.
[Passive] The lawyer’s office was littered with cigar butts.
[Active] Cigar butts littered the lawyer’s office.
[Passive] The cash made from playing poker was plunked down in front of my mortified father.
[Active] I plunked down the cash I made from playing poker in front of my mortified father.
Passive voice can lend the stamp of authority to a statement and can also absolve the author of personal responsibility. In certain cases, this is effective: “Mistakes were made.” (Visualize an army general explaining why a smart bomb blew up the cookie factory.)
Yet most of the time, passive voice slows down the action and weakens the impact. Often, academic writers will craft an entire book predominantly in passive voice. That’s fine if they are aiming only for a scholarly market or are writing college textbooks, but most publishers of mass market books don’t want this. They usually instruct copy editors to change most passive verb tenses to make the book reader-friendly.
While writing, be on the lookout for an overuse of “is, was, were, am, are, will be, have been” and also “There is,” “There are,” “There was,” There were,” “It was,” and “It is.”
Use the following verb tenses only when absolutely necessary or in sentences where they actually sound better: for example, instead of “I am living on Maple Street,” write “I live on Maple Street.” Other examples of this verb tense are “I was living,” “they are living,” “we were living,” “he was running,” “she was asking,” and so on (in other words, pairing any verb with passive “is, am, was, were,” and so on).
It's fine to use these verb tenses occasionally, but if you find that 90 percent of your verbs are in this category, you've got a problem. Your book will sound flabby and, IMHO, a bit amateurish. As a first choice, use simple present or past tense wherever possible: “he ran,” “she asked,” “we live,” “we lived.”
(Now forgive me if I proceed to break this rule and put some of these book editing tips in passive voice. I need to invoke the voice of authority.)
Examples:
[Passive] Holes in my sandals were patched with chewing gum.
[Active] I used chewing gum to patch holes in my sandals.
[Passive] The lawyer’s office was littered with cigar butts.
[Active] Cigar butts littered the lawyer’s office.
[Passive] The cash made from playing poker was plunked down in front of my mortified father.
[Active] I plunked down the cash I made from playing poker in front of my mortified father.
The next “crime I committed” from an editor’s viewpoint was
to use confusing sentence structure. It all made sense to me but each time
Patricia would ask me “Did you mean this or that?” I realized it was not clear and that it would
confuse the reader.
3. Confusing Sentence Structure
One mind-numbing problem occurs with long sentences punctuated by several
clauses that separate the subject from the verb. If readers have to stop and trace their
way back to the beginning of a sentence to decipher the meaning, you’ve lost them.
Nowadays people don’t have the patience for this.
“That it was the Pavlovians’ choice to jump into a battle in which they had no
quarrel, when they would have gained incalculable rewards by patiently standing
aside while the Canine Corps and the Feline Brigade tried conclusions, which
profoundly altered the ultimate strategic result of the war, was ignored or minimized.”
[Book editor's note: Too much information and distance between the noun “choice,”
and the verb “was ignored or minimized.”]
One mind-numbing problem occurs with long sentences punctuated by several
clauses that separate the subject from the verb. If readers have to stop and trace their
way back to the beginning of a sentence to decipher the meaning, you’ve lost them.
Nowadays people don’t have the patience for this.
“That it was the Pavlovians’ choice to jump into a battle in which they had no
quarrel, when they would have gained incalculable rewards by patiently standing
aside while the Canine Corps and the Feline Brigade tried conclusions, which
profoundly altered the ultimate strategic result of the war, was ignored or minimized.”
[Book editor's note: Too much information and distance between the noun “choice,”
and the verb “was ignored or minimized.”]
The following long sentence has
no major grammatical errors, but with so much
happening, the reader has to work hard to follow the thread of ideas. Breaking it into
two or three sentences would help.
“Yet however effective the Pavlovians believed that the call to war would be in
rousing the asylum’s inmates to invade Burger King and the other restaurants in
their path--and the evidence is that Professor Barkley, at least, who hung onto his
dreams of an invincible Canine Nation dominated by the schutzhunds, had high
hopes for an inmates’ uprising--the threat of anarchy spreading would prompt the
ASPCA to keep Feline troops permanently stationed in every Long John Silvers for
the rest of the war.”
happening, the reader has to work hard to follow the thread of ideas. Breaking it into
two or three sentences would help.
“Yet however effective the Pavlovians believed that the call to war would be in
rousing the asylum’s inmates to invade Burger King and the other restaurants in
their path--and the evidence is that Professor Barkley, at least, who hung onto his
dreams of an invincible Canine Nation dominated by the schutzhunds, had high
hopes for an inmates’ uprising--the threat of anarchy spreading would prompt the
ASPCA to keep Feline troops permanently stationed in every Long John Silvers for
the rest of the war.”
And I was absolutely convinced those were real words…
5. Coining
New Words: Sometimes It Works, Other Times . . . Not So Much
“The teen patted her ‘food baby’ and sneeringly referred to Dr. Atkins as a quack.”
[Book editor's note: Maybe you thought I would single out "food baby," but someone coined this term years ago and it stuck, thus becoming part of the popular lexicon. No, the culprit here is “sneeringly.” We cannot turn every adjective into an adverb simply by adding “ly.” Well, technically we can, but is this a creation we’ll be proud of?]
“The teen patted her ‘food baby’ and sneeringly referred to Dr. Atkins as a quack.”
[Book editor's note: Maybe you thought I would single out "food baby," but someone coined this term years ago and it stuck, thus becoming part of the popular lexicon. No, the culprit here is “sneeringly.” We cannot turn every adjective into an adverb simply by adding “ly.” Well, technically we can, but is this a creation we’ll be proud of?]
I had not planned on writing a book however when so many of
my friends encouraged me to put my emails into book form I decided to do it. However, while transforming emails into
stories it was very easy to commit the following crime (and I am guilty as
charged!)
9. Time Travel in All
Directions
In the following example, by randomly switching verb tenses the author tosses the reader
from the past to an indefinite imagined future and back to the present.
“Imagine that you have been invited to sail the Caribbean with someone who has
equipped his yacht with a state-of-the-art audio system and jet-plane-decibel-level
speakers. Looking forward to a quiet, peaceful voyage, you are trapped in a small
space and bombarded with bone-jarring noise.”
[Editor's note: The previous passage travels confusingly back and forth through time.
In the first sentence, you have been invited, but presumably this is before you go on
the trip. In the second sentence, you start out looking forward to a trip that hasn’t
happened yet, but in mid-sentence you are already on the yacht, trapped.]
In the following example, by randomly switching verb tenses the author tosses the reader
from the past to an indefinite imagined future and back to the present.
“Imagine that you have been invited to sail the Caribbean with someone who has
equipped his yacht with a state-of-the-art audio system and jet-plane-decibel-level
speakers. Looking forward to a quiet, peaceful voyage, you are trapped in a small
space and bombarded with bone-jarring noise.”
[Editor's note: The previous passage travels confusingly back and forth through time.
In the first sentence, you have been invited, but presumably this is before you go on
the trip. In the second sentence, you start out looking forward to a trip that hasn’t
happened yet, but in mid-sentence you are already on the yacht, trapped.]
In the end I was very happy with the whole editing process.
It proved fun and very educational and I can already see that I have put a lot
of what I have learned into practice and my next book will (hopefully) not
require nearly as much editing! Patricia Waldygo mentions that a book editor
will work with you to:
* Emphasize
your own unique voice, cut away the “deadwood,” and use language that will
appeal to your target audience.
* Ensure that your words are clear, concise, and accurate in conveying your message.
* Focus not only on the details but on the macrocosmic view and, if necessary, rearrange sections of the book for better flow and understanding.
* Fix all errors of syntax, grammar, spelling, capitalization, and so on, as dictated by the Chicago Manual of Style.
* Ensure that your words are clear, concise, and accurate in conveying your message.
* Focus not only on the details but on the macrocosmic view and, if necessary, rearrange sections of the book for better flow and understanding.
* Fix all errors of syntax, grammar, spelling, capitalization, and so on, as dictated by the Chicago Manual of Style.
Therefore I cannot recommend strongly enough the importance
of a good editor. That does not mean that every edited book is going to be a
great read, nor that everyone will love a certain book, but at least we, as
self published authors, are providing the readers with a book free from
spelling and grammatical errors and in turn, will earn respect if we produce a
quality product.
Guest Blogger Bio
Ivanka Di Felice is a writer living in Tuscany. She
will assure you that it's far less pretentious than it sounds. She was born in
Toronto, Canada. She is 39 years and 94 months old. In her quest for happiness,
she followed Nora Ephron’s advice: “Secret to life, marry an Italian.” She
loves writing humorous stories and enjoys reading.
Author Links:
Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8188137.Ivanka_Di_Felice
Ivanka's Book:
I enjoyed your article so much, I am jumping on the linkie to Patricia Waldygo's original article and reading it. My editor, whom I love, will thank me for it. Besides, there are some fuschia colored passages I cannot read as the text is overlapped. Thanks for the great advice! xo
ReplyDeleteSo sorry about the fuchsia incident, Muffy. :( I will try to fix it so it is legible.
DeleteLOVE this!!!
ReplyDeleteWonderful article! I love lists.
ReplyDeletewww.editingpen.net
Thanks for stopping by, Jessie and D.A.!
ReplyDelete