Also, in regards to the cake, you donât even know for certain thatâs what happened. I made a fancy decorated cake for a social groupâs special event, and everything was perfect with it, until I left it in the commercial refrigerator at the event space. (Normally I wouldnât put cake in the fridge, but I think it mightâve been hot that weekend. I forget; it was a while ago.) All the moisture in the fridge got sucked into the icing, and the whole lot blurred and started to slide off the cake. Different cause from âicing while hotâ; very similar outcome. My friends were pretty good about it. Which is good, because I already knew what Iâd done wrong, and having them tell me after the fact would not have helped.
Like anarchycox, Iâm a trained editor. I also took two year long novel-writing subjects (one per year) as part of my professional writing and editing degree. Of that class, three of my classmates have been published multiple times, and two of them have shortlisted or won awards. As part of that subject, we had to workshop our writing. We would bring in a couple of thousand words or so, and submit it to critique by our peers.
Not everyoneâs feedback was useful. And not only that, but their suggestions for how to fix the âproblemsâ they found were not always correct.
We were all writing different genres. C wrote literary crime fiction. N was writing a spy thriller. T was writing beautifully vulnerable and very funny chick lit. J2 was writing a coming-of-age new-adult novel. My bff J and I were both writing YA fantasy, and we both read a lot of YA fantasy. Our novel teacher was amazing and knowledgable, but she wrote literary fiction. There were things sheâd pick up to critique in Jâs and my manuscripts that were just standard conventions of the genre.
The thing is, when Iâd take those annotated manuscripts home again, with a dozen different handwriting scrawled across the page, this is what I found: my writing teacher was almost always right when she pointed out bits of my chapter that needed improving. But she was almost always wrong (when it came to my MS at least) as to what specifically was wrong, and also how to fix it. Not because she didnât know how to write, or know how to spot a good or bad piece of writing, but because she knew nothing about my genre, and hadnât read widely within it.
My education as an editor was two years long. It wasnât just about grammar, although that was part of it. It was also training in thinking about the structure of a piece of writing. And how to edit a book, not just how to look at the grammar. That a lot of decisions you make, even in regards to spelling and grammar, are choices of style, not questions of right or wrong. That there are different levels of âinterventionâ in terms of how much feedback to give. For some jobs, it doesnât matter if you notice X or Y; thatâs not what youâre there to solve. You have to stick to giving feedback on the part that is your job.
When you edit a book, itâs a conversation with the author/s, not a litany of the writerâs flaws. Sometimes youâll spot straight-up mistakes. But sometimes you just want to confirm that something you observed is what the writer intended. Perhaps youâll spot a way of rephrasing something, or a detail that could be added to bring a theme out. But in the end, the decision is usually with the author, who will look at your notes and make a change ⌠or sometimes write STET in the margin, which means âLeave this the fuck alone. I knew what I was doing.â
And if youâre proof reading, it often doesnât matter if you notice that thereâs two different Anglicisations of Stravinsky in the manuscript. Itâs too late to make that change. For many printers, publishers pay by the change requested, so the publisher might only want to know if an image is entirely missing, or (say) a whole paragraph has disappeared. If the Aboriginal flag has been printed upside down on the cover (which happened to one of the Lonely Planet guidebooks for Australia). Thatâs one of the interesting things you learn to do as a professional editor: WHEN NOT TO GIVE FEEDBACK.
The thing is this: the authors whose books or material Iâve worked on consented to my giving them feedback. Thatâs part of the publishing process. Fanfic authors have not. I still remember the nerves I would have every time it was my turn in novel class to bring excerpts from my novel in. Or even when I continued workshopping with J and D after we finished our course â even though the usual response was usually âThat was good. I want to read more.â And I had consented to that feedback. I was actively trying to improve. Yet it was still stressful af.
You might think that giving a hobbyist author criticism is helping them to improve, but what it can easily do is make them never want to share their writing ever again. Thatâs not cool, man. Thatâs not the role of an editor. My personal feelings about editing is that itâs meant to help the author be their best. Itâs not meant to break their spirit.
If you really desperately want to help authors improve and youâre really convinced that youâre the person to do it, offer your services as a beta. That way you can be useful by giving feedback to people who consented to receive it.