Let's Talk Editing

 I’ve wanted for some time now to write a post about editing - its aims, its process, its inherent fallibility - but haven’t set aside the time up 'til now. In the thick of editing Fortunes of War at the moment, I thought now would be the best time. I will *try* to express my views and experiences as gently as possible, but I can’t promise a bit of snark won’t slip through the cracks. Characters like Tenny and Náli did spring forth from my imagination, after all. 

I want to begin with the awkward part: addressing a false statement about me that continues to be repeated for reasons I can only guess. Reviews are for readers, yes. The opinions of readers are not my business, nor do they determine the course or style of my novels. But on occasion, an assertion is made by a reader, falsified, in fact, and foisted onto others as though true, in what I can only assume is an attempt to influence other readers, or me. Opinions are opinions, and everyone has one; but I have the right to set the record straight when someone lies about me, and does so for a period of several years. 

A claim was recently brought to my attention by a third party. A claim that I stated in my "newsletter" that I used a "computer program" to edit my books, and that none of them were edited by a human being. That they were in fact "not edited at all." A claim made repeatedly across multiple books and multiple years. 

For starters, I don't have a newsletter. I have a Facebook page, a Twitter account, an Instagram account, and this blog where I post updates and talk about my writing, but no newsletter. Does that matter? Yes. If you're going to lie about me, it matters. Secondly, I have never made such a statement, certainly not in my non-existent newsletter, and not on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or the blog either, because it's not true. In the decade that I've been publishing books, each book has been edited by "real people:" first by me, and then by my alpha reader/editor, who is a former teacher with a sharp eye for typos and sloppy punctuation. She's someone I know well, and who I trust, and who cares deeply about my artistic vision for each book. Do my books pass through as many rounds of editing, or as many editors, as a #1 NYT bestseller put out by one of the big five publishing houses? No. Of course not. It would be absurd to expect such a thing. But anyone claiming my books haven't been edited "at all," or that they've been edited by a computer program, or AI, or any means non-human, is lying. If you come across such a thing, please don't help spread that lie, and always come to one of my official pages with questions or concerns about what I have or haven't said about my work. 

Okay, that's the unpleasant housekeeping out of the way. Let's talk about editing in general. I think it's important to make the distinction between editing in a purely artistic sense, versus editing for traditional publication. Both are means of bettering and correcting a piece of writing, but one is more ruthless and numbers-driven. But no matter the end objective, it's never a perfect process; it can't be, because it's a process carried out by humans, and humans inevitably overlook things, or make decisions that certain readers won't agree with or like. 

In trad publishing, there's very few authors who get to "write their own tickets," so to speak. A tiny percentage are so popular, their books so guaranteed to pull in the big numbers for the publishing house, that those books are allowed a little breathing room. Longer page counts, more creative freedom for the authors, all the flashy bus stop ads and in-store standees. The big blog push, and the scrolling banners at the top of the Goodreads homepage. Books that are the moneymakers. The editors and execs aren't breathing down Stephen King's neck, Nobody's going to tell SJM to maybe dial it back a couple hundred pages on the next release. A very small portion of books at each house haul in millions - the other books barely break even, and most are a financial loss. Those are the books that get edited to death. For publishers, it's about cutting costs, and that usually means cutting page counts - arbitrarily. If a loss is expected on a book, they trim down the page count. That's why you hear authors bemoaning the fact that they "have to find 20,000 words to cut on my manuscript." Those firm word counts are based purely on cost, not on the quality of the book as a work of art. Publishers also love trying to model books on those that sell the best: it's why you see so many similar covers and titles. Titles like A ___ of ___ & ___. It's why you see the same marketing memes everywhere, Booktok ready graphics at every turn. It's why the language of novels begins to feel very much the same. 

And then there's the fallacy that trad pub books aren't chock full of typos and factual errors. I once suffered through an Avon paperback romance in which the author went on for three pages about the Trojan war (an extended metaphor to be sure) and she repeatedly wrote about the Trojans having made the Trojan horse. Dear reader, the Greeks made the horse, and when the Trojans pulled it inside the walls, Greek soldiers slunk out in the night to slay them. Nowhere in the editing process at Avon did anyone catch this mistake. Nay, I'll say that no one knew any better. The last time I read a J.R. Ward book, I decided to keep a tally of typos, and I found 45. I don't say that to pick on her, but to demonstrate that even an author that widely-read and well-known, equipped with teams of help from the publishing house, including editors, proofreaders, betas, etc., can wind up with a book chock-full of typos. And I'm not trying to knock trad pub authors or books, merely point out that trad pub is not a guarantee that the book you're reading is free of error. None are, because humans aren't perfect. 

Obviously, I'm not traditionally published. God knows I'd love to be, to have a little more financial security, to have a broader reach. But I'm not, and while being indie certainly has its drawbacks, it also has one very big advantage: I don't have to answer to anyone. For me, the editing process is about shaping the book into the best possible version of itself, and I don't have to worry about cutting length for dollar signs, nor matching my voice and style to that of whatever book in the genre is currently the most popular. My goal is to match the end product on the page to my creative vision as closely as possible. 

I start by getting my hands on a physical copy. I had difficulty with that during the pandemic; my internet sucked so badly that I couldn't get the file to load into the paperback formatting tool on KDP, and couldn't go bum wifi at a coffeeshop or anywhere, which I don't love doing anyway. Editing on the computer only is not my friend, it turns out. But I'm back to doing things the way I prefer, and hope to one day have time to go back and give the first few Drake books another once-over. The typical process begins with a paperback proof copy and a highlighter. I go sit somewhere relatively quiet, begin at page one, and savage that sucker with the highlighter. I mark every typo I find, every missed comma, every sentence that felt fanciful while writing, but which proved an unwieldy snarl upon reading. That first read-through is a free-for-all: inconsistencies, awkward diction, incorrect punctuation, and typos. I keep a pen on-hand and add notes in the margins; leave myself markers where I need to go back and expand, and X out entire passages that feel redundant. 

My editor reads her own copy concurrently, and we communicate back and forth as we go. Because I wrote the book, I know what it's supposed to say, and it's easy to read it the way I intended, overlooking the smaller errors. My editor is great at finding those, and she's quick to tell me when she thinks I've gone overboard. She pulls me back from some of my...grittier choices. For instance, in Nothing More, there was a scene in which I wrote Toly vomiting from stress, and she disagreed. She was right, in this instance. But there are times I disagree; I heed her warning, and perhaps trim a few of the nastier details of a scene, but ultimately decide that the character needs the shock of the original wording. We have lots of in-depth conversations about character motivations, and the way the character's actions read on the page. I tell her how I want the character to come across, and we can then tailor the scene to ensure that the wording is clear, whether the goal is for the character to seem sympathetic, or downright dastardly. This is in no way a guarantee that every reader will agree or read the scene the same way; but it's not possible to force an across-the-board agreement from every reader. So we rework, and then reread, and rework again, and then leave the scene be when it's the best version of itself. Sometimes this involves a tweak as small as changing the direction of a character's gaze, and sometimes it involves an entire conversation rewrite. You have to take it scene-by-scene, line-by-line. 

After all of that, I go in and apply all the changes, and then it's time for us to give it a proofread. At this point, the story is locked in, the actions are all fixed in place, and it's time to hunt down those pesky typos. 

Press pause, and I want to talk about typos a minute. I've seen criticisms that say a reader found "typos, wrong words, missing words, etc." Y'all, those aren't separate issues: they're all typos. "Typo" stands for "typographical error," and just means that in the process of typing out the story, a wrong key was hit, autocorrect screwed you over, or you had a brain fart, and then you missed it when you read back through your work. An inordinate amount of pearl-clutching goes on over typos, and hilariously enough, the reviews that complain the most are the ones that contain the most typos. Typos happen. They happen to Stephen King, and J.R. Ward. They happened to the illustrious Jane Austen and the incomparable Dorothy Dunnett. No typo was ever left in a manuscript because the author and editors thought the typo was correct; nobody meant to say "he put on his shit" instead of his "shirt." (That, funnily enough, is one of my most common typos. I catch it in editing and cringe every time.) Most often, typos are missed because the brain reads the rest of the sentence, knows what the author meant to type, and fills in the correct word. Sometimes, whoever is editing is too tired, too distracted, too pissed off about something unrelated. A typo is the literary equivalent of stubbing your toe, or spilling your drink, or rear-ending someone in traffic because you were trying to do your mascara at a redlight. They're "oops"s and "oh shit"s, but they're not, as the pearl-clutchers like to insist, the result of ignorance. Humans err; it happens to all of us. 

I type really, really fast, 300 words per minutes. I type with both hands, with my eyes on the screen, and never look down at my keyboard. Rapid-fire bursts of inspired typing in which I'll pause, backspace, rewrite, keep going. The typo is a spur-of-the-moment mistake, and I tend to have usual ones, interestingly enough. Something about my stubby fingers leaves me with an E on the end of "was" a lot of the time. I do the "shit/shirt" thing a lot. But rest assured I know that "wase" isn't a real word. 

That was a bit of a tangent, wasn't it? It's a bit of an overlong post in general. But I went to the trouble because I think it can be easy, in today's world of oversaturated social media, short attention spans, AI, and instant gratification, to forget that there are real people behind books. That by their very nature books are imperfect - and that's what makes them art. What makes them worthwhile. All too often, "editing" is used as shorthand for any aspect of a book that a reader didn't care for. Too long to read in one sitting? It needs editing. A character whose motivations you don't agree with personally? It needs editing. Descriptive prose? Needs editing. Issues that are personal to the reader, and not about editing at all. 

But editing itself is quite a lot of work. Just as writing is. Because I'm an indie, and because I don't have an agent or publisher to keep happy, I'm able to write exactly the sorts of books I want to. Books that don't quite fit in with trad pub offerings, but which I'm very proud to publish, and which I hope my readers enjoy. Each author is different; we all come from different backgrounds, and have different skills, different experiences with the craft. I was editing and tutoring well before I started publishing, but there are newer, less experienced authors who feel more comfortable employing more than one editor and utilizing larger groups of betas. It's not one-size-fits-all. My editor and I put a lot of time and energy into each book, and I hope that it shows - and I hope that you'll have a chuckle the next time one of my characters puts on his "shit." 

Thank you, readers, and always come to me if you want the official word on any of my books 😊💖