Last night, after a long conversation with my editor, I girded my loins and trudged into my absolute least favorite part of the book publishing process: the copy edit. You know the drill. After you've slaved for months over every word of this manuscript, some anal retentive, OCD-driven, hyper-literal grammar purist who never gets your sense of humor puts your work through the wood chipper and throws the pulp back on your desk with a parsimonious sneer. "Fix it."
Praise God and pass the red pencil.
As insanely annoying as it is to be tweezed on punctuation that is "technically correct but could be misinterpreted" and clever wording that "may be too arcane" and beloved passages that "cross the line of elegant variation" (I could go on, but that would be "an abuse of rule-bending parameters in the absence of serial commas"), I've grown to love and appreciate the people who do this work. A book lasts a long time. It should be tasked with correctness. It should be finely milled and meticulously crafted. Most importantly, however, it should say what the author wants it to say, and if the copy editor trips over something, that's a red flag that says some readers are not going to get it.
I've been doing this a long time, and I came out of parochial school with excellent traditional grammar and punctuation skills to begin with, so I hand off a pretty clean manuscript. A lot of the mark up is about the publisher's style sheet. At Simon & Schuster, the copy ed capitalized "the President"; now my Random House copy ed is striking it for lowercase. The serial comma, beginning a sentence with a conjunction, ending a sentence with a preposition -- all the rules are meant to be bent and broken, but not without a second glance from the writer.
A helpful hint for those early in their publishing career: use sticky notes for comments. Invariably, I get more and more annoyed as I go through the first half of the manuscript. I start out giving things a firm three dots and "stet!", but after a while, I can't resist commenting on the comments. I angrily whip into the margins: "Really? We need to spend another eight seconds of our lives changing 'Bill said' to 'said Bill'? Seriously?!"
By the 75% mark, I've realized that the copy editor has prevented me from embarrassing myself at least half a dozen times, and I have to go back and try to erase my red pencil retorts, which never works. I always end up returning the ms with a sheepishly grateful note for the copy ed's academic cat-o-nine-tails. It's the copy editor's job to flag every little thing and the writer's job to weigh that marking and decide if the choice is worth a potential speed bump for the reader. Key to sanity maintenance is seeing the ed's mark as saying "Maybe you should think about this?" instead of "Jayzee Q. Cripes, you're an idiot!"
I have nothing against self-publishing, but self-editing is self-delusion, and I worry about the growing sense that strenuous, objective editing isn't necessary. Margaret Mitchell's editor suggested changing the main character's name from "Pansy" to "Scarlet." That kinda says it all. (Make that "kind of." I've been told "'kinda' is a colloquialism that doesn't translate as well as Southern writers imagine." But then I've also been told "the capitalization of 'Southern' is no longer de rigueur.") And if you think anyone is above being edited,
check out this item from the New Yorker's "Book Bench."
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