It is challenging to edit my own writing. I must do battle with a tendency to fall in with the cadence of my prose like a good toy soldier on parade, counting out one, two, three, four … one, two … three, four! I look up from editing to realize that I have been more intent on admiring and far less intent on improving the text. This familiarity never breeds anything approaching contempt.
And come to think of it, a copy editor should never have contempt for the writing that is at hand. An attitude of alert and even hyper-alert attention paired with lodged suspicion will get you where you want to end up when you sit down to edit. Contempt will poison your spirit and drive off your business.
The late Prof. John Bremner said it this way: If your mother says she loves you, check it out.
Now that is suspicion.
Another piece of aggressive good advice from Bremner was this: Imagine, he said, that you are tossing a child into the air, and catching her, and tossing her into the air and catching her, and tossing her into the air and catching her, and … well, you get the idea. When you stop, and you put the child on her own two feet, what does she say?
Do it again!
This, Bremner said, is The Thrill of Monotony.
In your editing, practice The Thrill of Monotony.
And, I would add, suspicion.
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I am not exactly certain of my main fictional character Goose Grim’s attitude toward my hyper-alert and suspicious way with his precious daily blog posts in the novel series Grimoire: The Bros Grim Breakfast Serial – a Story in Pieces, but I do know this. I am the better writer and (need it be said?)the better editor. I take steps at all turns in the plot to make sure that this is true. Goose is good, and I am better.
Goose is my creation. In his genesis, I decided that I would let myself go when I wrote in Goose’s voice and that I would allow Goose all the puns, purple prose patches, and semi-retired clichés that he wished to use. Goose writes like I do, but Goose does not get the final edit where puns, purple prose patches, and semi-retired clichés come under fire from my relentless and suspicious scrutiny.
For Goose, I suspend The Thrill of Monotony.
If Goose misses the mark, that is fine. After all, that is the way my man Goose writes. He is a bit uneven.
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When I edit my own fiction, I have the same goals that I have toward any other editing job where someone is paying me to edit their work. I hope to do no harm to this other writer’s voice. I make changes that will seem subtle to this other writer, by learning to hear her voice, to celebrate her voice, and to make her voice as perfect in pitch as I am able to. This is much more than catching typos, and it is not making her prose conform to my self-satisfied and rigorous standards of usage and grammar and style and form, to say nothing of function.
If the work that I am editing is a dissertation, I will apply all the academic standards for formal writing, including conformance to the style guide of her discipline. If her writing that I am editing is personal in tone, I will hunt for her voice and that will be the standard. The same goes for her fiction. The rules will conform to her voice.
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There is a lovely freedom in editing Goose’s stuff. It is amusing and refreshing to stay my hand and allow all the little and picky things to slide on by. If Goose uses a parallel construction, I will allow him to leave out the crucial word or words that give the reader a clear signal that two trains are running on parallel tracks and that the sense of the sentence revolves around those words.
Goose is uneven at the best of times, usually in subtle ways. Sometimes he puts the signal words in and sometimes he goes with the first instance and leaves out the second. A lot of writers do not understand or value such signal words. AP copy is often edited in a way that ignores signal words in parallel constructions, and I am convinced that this approach is so familiar to us that we will use that approach ourselves and will assume that we are doing the best we can, in imitation of the ubiquitous AP tone. It may be all that you know.
AP copy, however, often ignores AP style. As does Goose.
In my essay writing, I include the signal words in my sentences. Otherwise, the reader will look up in the middle of things and realize that she has no idea where she is or how she got there, like a driver who leaves his GPS at home. My writer’s voice tends to produce complex sentences that do not always intend to create either straight or forward progression. I want you to have an experience along the way and a clear sense in the end of what I am saying and where I have been taking you. I want you to wander but not wonder.
Goose probably understands these things, at some level, but he has not been trained to do this or to fix his stuff when it strays from a clear standard of guiding the reader.
My brother-in-law does not like Goose. He thinks Goose is pompous and controlling, though I doubt that he would say that about me. I could fix that problem that he has with Goose, effortlessly, but both of us would mourn Goose’s passing and I would have Goose’s inky blood on my hands. I do not want that and neither does my brother-in-law. Nor does Goose, even if he has never come out and said so in print.
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How does one find another writer’s voice? This is the first and most important question to answer. If you can detect that other voice, your editing choices will flow from what you have decided you are hearing. It’s not preaching, or surgery, or rocket science, but your ability to hear, respect, and assist another writer — including those whom you create in your fiction — will be of ultimate concern for that writer. You are not like a surgeon holding her beating heart in your hands, but you are a kind of midwife who can assist or get in the way and do terrible harm, depending on your gifts, training, and intentions.
I cannot teach you what you need to know, but I can show you what I do, and if you are willing to give yourself up to this process, long on example and short on rules, your own editing will improve.
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One of the most helpful things that an editor can do is to mangle another writer’s prose. The teaching moment comes when you stand before a pissed-off colleague or friend who has your editing changes from yesterday’s newspaper, let’s say, in her hand. What will you say, how will you listen, and what will you learn?
When you let yourself down, you know it, too. When your book is in print and you read it, you will see countless places where you have faltered in ways that no one else will ever know or detect.
But you will know.
What to do?
As Goose would say, Get over it.
Do better next time.
Laugh.
Laugh particularly if you messed up. Laugh to keep from crying, and learn from your mistakes, too.
There is no other way.
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