Author: tshottleediting_hcwymb

Robot readingI have something to tell you. It may be hard for you to hear, but as a potential client–mine or someone else’s–you need to hear this. Are you ready?

Editors are human.

There. I said it.

Oh, we may use software tools to do our jobs. Some of us rely solely on The Chicago Manual of Style or The Elements of Style or even the more recent and user-friendly Actually, The Comma Goes Here (Hat tip to Michael Bracken for revealing that one to me.) Some of us even edit by memorized rules and years of experience, an elite few even turning off spell check and grammar check. Ooooh!

Actually, even in the days of typed manuscripts and few or no computers, those last editors were freaks of nature. I’m pretty sure Stephen King’s editors or the great Ruth Cavin at St. Martin’s Press kept at least The Elements of Style and/or The Chicago Manual of Style handy.

But editors are human. I’ve caught mistakes by the best. I’ve been called out by a couple of authors of mine, one of whom requested me again, the other who gave me a blurb. They want the best prose possible. Hey, have you ever told your mechanic you want your car done a certain way after they did a job for you? If there’s a little back and forth, that mechanic knows what you want, and you just gave them a new way to fix your car. (Maybe a bad example. Unless you’re customizing, cars are pretty rigid.)

Every author has, or should have, a stet privilege. I’ve had three editors at Down & Out. The first had some bizarre preferences for style, like “a-m” instead of “AM” (my preference, and I usually try to tell an editor that up front) or the standard “a.m.” The others have been Chris Rhatigan, whose presence is missed by those of us on Down & Out’s roster of authors, and Dawn Barclay, whom I’ve also edited. I probably stetted more suggestions on Chris than Dawn, but both of them, at least as editors, hew pretty close to my editing style. In Chris’s case, he had to deal with more made-up place names than Dawn did.

I’ve had others, including beta readers, who did full-on edits. I had one, whom I hope dug his heels in and started editing himself, who tended to treat the rules as iron-clad. No passive voice. Absolutely everything shown, even the most irrelevant details. Especially because that was an independently published book, I stetted. No harm, no foul, because I knew more coming out of that set of revisions than I knew going in. I’ve had some where I’d end up spotting glaring errors in the final copy. (“Dude, did you even read this?”) Most of those were zine editors who couldn’t be arsed, to use a quaint English phrase, as they had a huge stack of submissions to go through. Most have been good.

But a few things editors have to deal with which you may be blissfully unaware as we carve up your manuscript:

  • We can’t memorize every grammar rule out there. Oh, we have the style guides and ProWritingAid/PerfectIT/etc. to highlight errors. Or we may be whizzes at trimming up prose and making it as lean as possible. But in the end, we’re not perfect.
  • The more errors in a manuscript, the more get past us. Really, if you have a ton of misspellings or misplaced commas or even run-ons and excess passive voice, we’re going to miss some errors simply because we’re busy fixing the last one. It’s human nature, and even software tools either don’t catch everything or, as I’ve discovered, you spend a lot of time smacking the tool’s hand. (“No, stupid, that’s a made-up name! Stop correcting it!” Note to ProWritingAid’s developers: Entity name suggestions desperately need a Disable Rule function. 90% of them are a waste of time, and the other 10%, most of us can spot it without an assist.) Plus, any editor worth his salt is going to use Track Changes or equivalent, which results in a lot of red text and commented passages. So that oddball tense change you stuck in the third sentence of the paragraph where I chopped up your run-on? Well, all that red ink and highlighting just camouflaged it. Sorry.
  • You’re not the only writer on our dance card. If you’ve hired a freelance editor, keep in mind they have other clients. Sometimes, you get lucky and hire someone new to the biz, when they’re cheap and available. A lot of times, when you make an inquiry, we get excited as soon as we know the estimated cost (because, hey, new business!), but just the same, we sweat how we’re going to properly slot your work between the current project and the one booked after yours. It’s not just the fee, it’s the time. And if you’re publishing for a small press or hiring someone who edits for one, projects come pretty much on a conveyor belt. The publisher has a schedule to keep, which means we have to stay on top of the workload. But you need proper attention. Otherwise, you wouldn’t hire us.
  • Developmental editing is always expensive. I paid about a grand to a dev editor (who taught me developmental editing. Bless you, Stacy. Bless you.) That was cheap, mainly because she was new. I charge roughly $2500 depending on initial word count (payment plans negotiable.) I’ll do a story analysis, which is like a dev edit but with only a light copy edit and without the workshopping sessions over chat or phone, just copious notes and an outline, for a fraction of that. Copy edits are based on word count, but there’s more wiggle room to negotiate.
  • Having mentioned money, it should still always be about the reader. You know. The people you want to buy your books. I don’t work with clients who lecture me about their genius or how this is going to upend the literary world. I’ve not only been that writer (that lasted about five minutes before I got put in my place), I dealt with one, who tuned around and sent me three of the most abusive emails anyone’s ever sent me. Blocked on email, social media, and even Paypal. I also know editors who edit for the sake of editing. Uh-huh. Let’s say you get a project from Jim Fusilli, a Wall Street Journal columnist whom I’ve edited. Well, actually, Jim is so good, I basically proofread, moving the odd comma around and chopping maybe one run-on sentence. Are you telling me you’re going to cut anyway because you cut on principle? Now you’re editing to edit, not editing for the reader, not helping the writer.
  • Don’t take it personally. You paid for someone’s expertise. Flawed or not, you should know more once you have all that red ink back than when you sent in the clean manuscript. If you disagree with something, ask the editor why they flagged what they flagged. Most of us are also writers. In fact, if we edit, we get some good conversations going. Dawn Barclay and I had some really good conversations ahead of her edits on my Jim Winter collection, Winter of Discontent. (Sorry, no release date yet.) Helps that I edited one of Dawn’s anthologies, so we knew each other’s thinking already.
  • One editor will always change what another editor did. I’ve done it. Dawn did it to me, as about 75% of Winter of Discontent came from webzines over the last 25 years. Some of the previous editors I still know. And I once carved up a novel that was a bestseller a decade ago (even won awards*.) He was one of those who gave me a blurb (and some very useful pushback.) I have to purge a contemporary reference from No Marigolds in the Promised Land and am contemplating moving Bad Religion and Road Rules to a new publisher. Quite likely, as I did most of the editing on those myself, I will go through each of them and yell, “Hottle, what the hell were you thinking?!?!” (And I will edit the day after writing this and scold myself for using “?!?!” So far, only Nathan Singer has resisted purging that, and you have to read Nathan to understand why.)

We’re human. But we’re usually as objective as we can be. The best of us ask, “How’s the reader going to see this?” If we do that, we’ve given you a filter to look at your own work. That’s what you hired us to do.

*But not a major award. Sadly, that author doesn’t have a leg lamp in his living room. Unless he bought it on Amazon or eBay.

Phil Collins singing "Turn It on Again"
“I… I… IIIIIII!!!!”
Source: Genesis official YouTube channel

One bane of every writer, including this one, is watching how you start sentences, particularly in first person. I don’t mean sentence fragments. A newer editor and writer complained about that, to which I said, “I not only use them all the time, I once edited a book written almost entirely in fragments.” He was horrified, but the book, a two-week copy edit, would have taken more like six weeks or had to have gone back to the author for another trip across the keyboard. But there is one error I flag because, as a writer, I know it’s invisible during the creation process but will drive readers batty.

That opening word on every sentence in a given paragraph. I mentioned first person up front because it’s also the hardest to avoid, hardest to edit, and hardest for the writer to fix if it goes beyond the limits of a copy edit. Unless we’re in a developmental edit, where we’re already killing darlings and moving scenes around, I don’t rewrite. That’s not my job. My job is to flag where the prose needs tightened up. Even in a developmental edit, I’d flag a troublesome paragraph with a comment. (Thank you, Word. Thank you, Scrivener. Thank you, Google Docs.)  In first person, it’s hard not to start every sentence with “I.”

“I” is the most common word in a first-person narrative. The narrator is telling you a story, and the narrator, more often than not, is the protagonist–or thinks they are. So, you can have two or three paragraphs where the narrator starts every single sentence with “I.” Also in first person, it’s the hardest to fix. If it’s too onerous, I highlight and comment that it needs reworded. I can just see the writer cringing as they read that note. I can also hear them going “D’oh!” As a writer, I can relate.

But “I” is not the only offending word. “You” (usually in dialog), “he/she/they,” and, to my surprise, “the” are frequent offenders. And this frequently gets through a couple rounds of revision before I even see it. Like I said, it’s invisible when you’re writing.

Two instances where I won’t flag anything. The first is across paragraphs. If you use editing tools like I do (because having a digital flashlight helps considerably) you notice apps like ProWritingAid don’t like multiple sentences starting with “I/You/The/etc.”  regardless of paragraphs and dialog. The trouble is the reader doesn’t care. Even with action beats and dialog tags, everything inside the quotation marks is a new thought. And everything in other paragraphs should be separate thoughts. This happens, then this happens, then someone says this. So I ignore it. If it bugs the writer, then the writer can fix it.

The other case is when it’s deliberate. Someone is hammering a point home. “You never pick up your laundry. You never take your dishes to the sink. You never put the toilet seat down. You are a slob.” (Scenes from my first apartment. I wonder how that girlfriend is doing these days? Also, I do put laundry away and take dishes to the sink. Um… Maybe I’ll save that story for the new TS Hottle Substack in a couple of weeks. 😉 ) There, it’s deliberate, almost poetic, and probably humorous. I know some editors who will flag it because they think it’s their job to apply rules instead of make the prose more readable. That’s editing for editing’s sake, and frankly, no one knows or remembers the editor. They do know the writer, who has the power of the almighty Stet when doing revisions. (Incidentally, I did precious few stets with Chris Rhatigan, my predecessor at Down & Out, and Dawn Barclay, now my colleague at that vaunted crime press. We all have similar approaches. And as a writer, they get me.)

A particularly aggressive editor might flag everything. This is not malicious, and if you think that red ink is a stab at the soul, think again. It’s to make you, the writer, think before you stet. I’ve only met one editor who got overly aggressive with applying rules (and his show-don’t-tell example was the most absurd abuse of that chestnut I’ve ever seen), but unless they are rookies, those editors are few. The right editor won’t care (much) about the writer’s feelings, but they damn well better think of the reader, who’s going to be buying your prose. And sometimes, that means breaking the rules for readability.

 

*With apologies to Adrian Belew

Atticus screenshot
Source: atticus.io

I recently added formatting to my list of services. I’ll talking pricing and why certain types of projects are more expensive down the page a bit. But for now, I’ll talk about how I format.

I use an app called Atticus, which is web-based but functions like a desktop app. In Windows and on Macs, it behaves more like a phone app, which is really a harness for web data from a specific source. Think about how you manage your mobile phone account. It’s like that. Atticus was created in response to another great formatting product, Vellum, which is strictly a Mac product. Unlike writing and editing tool Scrivener, which started out on the Mac OS X platform because its user base would be more receptive, Vellum prefers to stay inside the late Mr. Jobs’s walled garden.  So for some people, the 90s never ended despite the two largest computer companies in the world abandoning hacked versions of the Xerox GUI-based OS from the early 1980s. (Yes, that classic Mac and Windows 3.1 are the exact same thing. Jobs just had better aesthetics than Gates, who liked to use his customers as unwitting beta testers.) So, with a need for a Windows-compatible solution, they created Atticus. 

Vellum screensho
Source: vellum.pub

I’ve had the app for about two years now, and it gets better every time I run an indie-pubbed project of mine through it. There are differences between Vellum and Atticus, but the two compare rather nicely. Atticus wants to also be your writing software, though that piece is neither a priority nor really matured yet. Seems developers are aware those of us using Word to write and those in the Cult of Scrivener will simply rise with one voice and yell, “Get off my lawn!” To quote that fine, upstanding paragon of the flower child generation, Chuck Napier*, I reach, brother. I reach.

But since Atticus and Vellum are compatible products that have earned their loyal following, let me speak on behalf of both my fellow Atticus formatters and our Mac-based brethren using Vellum: For the love of all that is holy, profane, and even mundane, please stop sending us manuscripts setup like we’re going to the printer!

I’ve gotten better about asking editing clients not to do this. I make an exception for my primary client, Down & Out Books, since they like to partially format before they set me and my fellow editors loose on it. We’ve grown used to this. It also helps them spot formatting issues before they put the final product together.

But how, oh, pompous IT guy who apparently can write, edit, and format, are we to send you a manuscript?

Simple. Many newer writers (of which I was one once upona) assume they’re responsible for the page headers and numbers. That’s actually the last thing that should happen because… You’re either sending it to a formatter or running it through formatting software yourself. And those nifty packages I just told you about? They do that for you. Where do you want your page numbers? Do you want them or a header (Author name on one page, title on the other.) at the beginning of a chapter? Do you want all your chapters to start on the right-hand side? (My personal preference.) What font do you want to you use? Most of us who format will ignore the ebook formats, but print has a lot of work. In print is where headers, scene breaks, and chapter titles (even when it’s just Chapter 1, etc.) come into play.

A few things that will make your formatter’s (or yours if you DIY it) easier:

  • We don’t need the page numbers yet. We just need to know if your story begins on Page 1 or whatever page the prologue or Chapter 1 starts on. Every author and every publisher is different. Again, this only comes into play when you’re independent or a really small press. 
  • Make your chapter titles Headers (as in the paragraph styles, not an actual page header. Confusing, but different.) Atticus and Vellum look for those.
  • This is more for anthologies and collections. For most projects, I will charge a flat $75.  If you want the story title in the header and/or the author name for each story, that will cost you a little more. I can’t speak to Vellum’s capabilities (and any Vellum users, please chime in. This is useful information for potential clients, not just mine.)  Currently, Atticus does not do separate titles and writers throughout a single book. So that will have to be done in Word, requiring section breaks, really annoying header management, and trying to get the correct trim size in PDF. (Scrivener users, please chime in as Scrivener has awesome formatting capabilities as well.)
  • Ask if your formatter will do your cover. I send people to GetCovers.com after I have a print page count. That doesn’t happen until after formatting.
  • Scene breaks. The standard is all over the place, but both Atticus and Vellum give you the option to use an image for your scene breaks or even a blank line. However, it has to know where to break them. Your editor or publisher wants “#” centered  to break scenes. Your formatter wants “***”, also centered. Be consistent, because we can always search-and-replace.

*Not only did Chuck make a career playing hard-ass military types, but he famously was a space hippie in the original Star Trek. Chuck looks like he was having fun. Nimoy and Shatner look extremely annoyed in that episode. I reach.

CrutchesA while back, I wrote about crutch words and the approach I took to weeding them out. A working editor is a work in progress, and I am no exception. I developed a four-word approach to “Words That Must Be Scrutinized!!!” (Cue really loud gong.) The offending words are “suddenly,” “just,” “very,” and “that.” Yes, “that” can be a crutch word. The story analysis project I’m finishing up as I write this also abused “and.” Mind you, the author is an admitted first-time writer who does not speak US English trying to write in US English. English as a first language is weird enough. I get headaches rendering an alien language into Elizabethan English to convey excessive formality, so I get it.

I’ve modified since then. I don’t do a “that” check anymore. That is used more often legitimately than as a crutch, so you could easily get a thousand instances of it in a long manuscript. ProWritingAid is pretty good at flagging it when it’s used to join a long sentence together. Never say “The fact that…” Just say “The fact…”

But I got so zealous about purging and replacing “that” with “who,” “how,” and “which,” that I got pushback from both author and publisher. (The author turned around and wrote a blurb for my editing work, so it’s a case of making good better.) So now, I look to see if “that” is unnecessary in context. 

I still go after “very” and “suddenly.” In fact, I get mad if I can’t delete “suddenly.” “Just” remains a sticking point. It’s the most abused of the three. One writer, who’s been around for decades, had seven instances on one page! It is a monumental pain in the ass to weed those out, and in a couple of instances, I had to leave two on the page. But it’s a crutch word.

Once upona, I used to go after “should” because Bestelling Author™, who had a writing course®, said it’s a bad word. Probably is. Too many “shoulds” on a page will annoy the reader without them realizing why. I quit doing that because it ended up giving me stilted prose in my own work and annoyed an editing client early on. This is also I don’t do writing books. I publish independently or small press, so until they start showing up on bestseller lists or I have a waiting list for my services, I’m not going to be a shill and pretend to know more than I do. Here, I’m sharing what I see on the job. 

So it’s “very,” “suddenly,” and “just.” I’ve added one more because I caught it in print in one of my own books: form. Why is “form” bad? It’s not as long as you are filling out a form, you’re admiring that other person’s cute form, or your mother-in-law, in her rage, assumes her demon form.* But every so often, in the heat of writing, we type “form” instead of “from.” It’s something that even an editor can miss. We’re not perfect, and two errors can hide a third in plain site. So I check all the instances of “form.” 99% of the time, they’re all correct. That remaining one percent usually sees a character bopping out to Sinatra singing “The Girl Form Ipamena.” So, yeah, the writer probably wants to know about that typo.

As I said before, different editors have different approaches. Some will zap anything with an “-ly” in it. Some have long lists of words they never want to see in a manuscript again. Others just read it in context and decide if it sticks out like a sore cliche.  

* Actually, my mother-in-law is a sweet 80-year-old lady. My ex-mother-in-law is a nice Mormon lady with a decidedly un-Mormon sense of humor who definitely gave it to her daughter. Who happens to be my favorite ex. I’ve married often. And well. Not many people can say that. 

Robert Plant and Jimmy Page in concert.
Led Zeppelin

Following on last week’s column (or was it this week? I was late getting it out.), the word “was” and its close relatives bring to mind the core reason I wrote about it last week. It robs the prose of immediacy. Let’s face it. If you’re a writer in today’s world, especially a fiction writer, you can’t afford to lose immediacy. People have short attention spans. If someone has been sitting down to read your work, you’d better keep their attention before Netflix drops the final season of Stranger Things or the Kardashians do something they think is noteworthy.

First, let’s look at the three main verb tenses in English. And thanks to eslgrammar.org for the assist. They have a handy page to look this up.

Writers in rough drafts, including those two hacks TS Hottle and Jim Winter, tend to use what’s termed past continuous when writing action. Most prose is written in past tense. They often write past continuous to convey action. Only, to the reader, it just looks like passive voice. 

“He was walking into Clarksdale.”

Robert Plant gets a free pass on that line because he needed to keep time with Jimmy Page’s chords in that song. You, gentle reader, who hope to have gentle readers of your own, don’t get a pass. Unless our intrepid Clarksdale-bound hiker is interrupted as he’s coming into town, the line should be “He walked into Clarksdale.” Simple. Short. Declarative. Hemingway would be proud. And he would know. Even Hemingway’s passive voice reads like action. (That’s another post.)

So what are the tenses?

There are three main ones: Past, present, future. If you’re writing time travel, you’re on your own. Even Douglas Adams and the writers of Doctor Who make fun of those who try to invent tenses. 

Then we have the continuous tenses, indicating ongoing action by the subject. I was walking into Clarksdale. I am walking into Clarksdale. I will be walking into Clarksdale. In everyday speech, this is fine as long as you can be understood. In prose, I read it aloud and look at the sentences around the offending phrase. As I said in my last post, it’s fine if our intrepid walker does one thing and is either interrupted or does something else as well. If not, well then, he walked into Clarksdale. This assumes, of course, the main action will be happening in Clarksdale (and without that clunky future continuous phrase, which has damned few use cases.)

Then we have the perfect tenses. The first two almost always indicate past events. Past perfect (“I had walked into Clarksdale.”) and present perfect (“I have walked into Clarksdale.”), indicating the speaker or point-of-view character has walked into Clarksdale at least once. Future perfect means the speaker or POV character will walk into Clarksdale at least once before a future point in time in question.

But wait! There’s more!

Past/present/future perfect continuous!  “I had been walking into Clarksdale,” meaning this was at some point in the past a frequent occurrence. “I have been walking into Clarksdale,” meaning this is something ongoing. “I will have been walking into Clarksdale,” meaning this is something likely to occur regularly or repeatedly in the future.

Again, you need a good reason to go with this. A lot of writers use the continuous tenses (both basic and perfect) thinking it conveys action. Unfortunately, there’s that word “was” (or “is” or “are” or “will be.”) Any time the reader sees that, the brain fires up “Passive voice!” and passive voice is to be avoided. (Not always, but a future post will be written about that.) The best use case for continuous is when the phrase is followed by “when.” “I was walking into Clarksdale when…” Then the action is disrupted. Which basic past/present tense doesn’t convey very well.

The only other time you should really use it is when you need to line up your rhythm with Jimmy Page’s playing. Then you’re going to send your old pal Tom tickets as I’ve only seen two Yardbird guitarists live. One has passed on, and the other has turned out to be an idiot. Unfortunately, Pagey is largely retired, so a pass to see him live would be greatly appreciated. 

Originally posted to Reaper Edits

Was (Not Was)
Source: last.fm

No, not the well-regarded 80s band led by producer Don Was. Was (along with is, are, were) is a double-edged sword for writers. Why? Used in action verbs, it blunts to impact of a sentence. And used as the verb itself, it’s passive voice. If you listen to hundreds of writing experts and “experts,” passive voice is to be avoided like cliches. Or like the plague, which is also a cliche.

Not all passive voice is bad. But a writer should use it sparingly. A lot of times, I’ll end up flipping a sentence around to get rid of it. It’s best left to description. Action? That’s a little different. You have to read each and every instance of was/is/are/were followed by an -ing. Nine times out of ten, you can shorten it to the actual verb.

“He was walking toward the park…” Now, if he’s going to be interrupted in the act of walking to the park, this makes sense. Or if another character intercepts him while he’s walking to the park (like I just wrote here), the “was” and an “-ing” makes sense. If he’s getting from point A to point B and ends up in the park before anything happens, then “He walked toward the park…” is better.

Was takes the immediacy away. Do that, and you also take the reader interest away. A lot of editors brag about cutting. (And sometimes, a less-skilled editor cuts just to cut. That’s when it becomes about the editor. If you’re a freelance editor, stop that!) But a good rule of thumb is to look for any fat you can trim. “Was/Is” makes a great shorthand to get rid of a lot of fat and punch up the prose. And while passive voice will show up in everything we write, less is always more.

Next week, I will talk about a rule about prepositions up with which I will not put!

 

Originally posted to Reaper Edits

Broken pencil while writing
1311784 by smengelsrud/pixabay.c
Copyright: CC0 Creative Commons

Ah, the lowly dash. And it’s many forms. We so love using them, especially Gen X and Millennial writers. We especially love our em dashes (— ). Nothing wrong with that, though I wish Cormac McCarthy had made peace with quotation marks before he died. Blood Meridian was brilliant but hard to read.

And yet, as I go through my latest editing project and look back on my previous one, I keep seeing a dash error that drives me to distraction. The previous project came from the pen of a guy who started doing this before I was born. (My first election was Reagan’s reelection bid, for perspective, when David Lee Roth sang for Van Halen on Ye Olde Victrola whilst we drove the ol’ La Salle to the Woolworth’s for a grape Nehi.*) Yet, I also received back the latest Jim Winter offering back from Dawn Barclay, my talented colleague at Down & Out Books. As I am Jim, I received a rude awakening. I do the same damn thing! What is this horrific atrocity in writing?

Grandpa Simpson yells at cloud.
Fox

Everyone, and I mean everyone, including your humble narrator, hyphenates adverbs. STOP THAT! (Pauses to go yell at both TS Hottle and Jim Winter and hopes wife doesn’t call the men with the butterfly nets and strait-jacket.)

What bugs me about Dawn’s horrific revelations is the next Winter book is a collection. Which means two-thirds of these stories were edited by someone else before I cleaned them up. Eek! That’s two editorial passes that missed that error. Strangely, I never get called out on em dashes. Once, when Second Wave was beta read, I did get a note on the difference between the em dash and the en dash and a hyphen.

  • Hyphens: Hyphens are used to join two words into the single idea. Most often, you see it in some last names, like Alec Walker-Jones. It also can join two adjectives, such as “music-obsessed.” Occasionally, it’s used with nouns, but not often. Technically, hyphens are not dashes. They are not to be used to join any word ending in –ly to another word. So, the phrase “criminally-wrong” is just “criminally wrong.”
  • En dashes: Sometimes used to join words the way hyphens sometimes do. Calling a hyphen an en dash in a number, time, or date range (200-300, 1939-1945, 3:00-3:45) is technically correct, which is often the best kind of correct. But never best-kind, because “best” is an adjective, which is like all those “-ly” words Stephen King tells you not to use yet frequently abuses.
  • Em dashes: Em dashes are the favorite punctuation mark of any writer born between 1964 and 1997. We love them! We use them in lieu of parentheses—though inside a sentence, they must be used in pairs—and to indicate someone’s speech has been interrup— Why the disdain for parentheses? Why not use ellipses(…)? Ellipses indicate trailing off. As for parentheses, believe me, when I first started writing, I was a serial parentheses abuser. Someone pointed out I wrote too many asides in my essays—which, by the way, can get annoying. (See what I did there?) As Microsoft Word improved, along with its alternatives and tools like Scrivener, grammar tools helpfully autocorrected the double hyphen (“–”) into an em dash. Em dashes may or may not be technically correct—still the best kind of correct, but not best-kind of correct, but they really do enhance readability. My tenth-grade English teacher may disagree, but my tenth-grade English teacher thought Led Zeppelin would give me a heart attack and Heinlein would rot my mind. (Jury’s out on the latter.) So, suck it, Clara.

So there you have it. Hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes.

*Do they still make Nehi?

Originally posted to Reaper Edits

Once upon a time, I read Tom Clancy’s novels. They were brilliant adventure pieces, though Jack Ryan ultimately became a bit of a Mary Sue character. I was young and my imagination locked into The Hunt for Red October and Cardinal of the Kremlin (the Cold War still a thing back then.) But as I read more and read widely, I discovered something Clancy did that I absolutely cannot stand.

g4f01e49f6df40fa45f0c5abb227684dbfb67e64f386eb8a6345bcbd6440074b054b693ecbe30fce3a9de1212c8f89041_1280-108545.jpgTom Clancy head hops like nobody’s business.

This was an early problem for me as a writer. Part of it came from inhaling movies in the 90s, back when an original idea still had cache. But then there were my authorial influences, the biggest of which was Stephen King. While I loathe head hopping, if done right, you either don’t notice it or realize it moves a scene along perfectly. As an editor, I will smack an author’s hand every time they do it. Why? It’s distracting.

To date, only four authors I’ve read pull off the in-scene head hop smoothly: Stephen King, George Pelecanos, SA Cosby, and Frank Herbert. And Herbert should have stopped doing it after The Children of Dune. (Some say he should have stopped writing Dune novels after Children, but I’ll save that discussion for another forum.) Everyone else, cut it out. Now.

Head hopping, if you haven’t picked up on it, is when you write what’s often called “close third person,” sometimes called “partially omniscient,” though I haven’t heard that term since Reagan’s first term. The character in focus is not the narrator, but the author gets into their head. Now, you can have multiple point-of-view characters in a novel, but only one character per scene. Meaning, if Sally is the point-of-view character in a scene, you may get into her head, have interior monologue, have reactions the other characters cannot see, and feel her emotions. But you can’t slip over to Jack’s head during the scene.

“Well, why not?”

Simple. It makes it harder for the reader to keep track. And especially now, in a time when attention spans are miniscule, you risk throwing the reader out of the story when they’re not sure who’s doing or saying what.

I’ve seen on some forums where fledgling authors puzzled why some famous authors have more than one POV per chapter? I scratched my head when I read this and realized they were listening to the flood of podcasts on writing put out by writers who make more money writing about writing and marketing than they do selling their own fiction. (Why I don’t do a writing book of my own.*) Of course, some of it, too, is the trend toward shorter chapters. Most writers I know do multiple scenes per chapter, so the head hopping between scenes is pretty much mandatory.

First person, of course, eliminates this. Second person should be avoided, though Mick Wall, in his Led Zeppelin bio, uses it to great effect. Probably because, while the book was unauthorized, received a lot of input from the various members of Zeppelin and Jason Bonham. Also, that was nonfiction about people Wall knows very well or had extensive contact with their various circles of friends, enemies, and associates.

“But what about omniscient point of view? Isn’t that in everyone’s head?”

You could argue that, but think about the great literature over the last three centuries. Prior to 1749, English had two great novels: Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels, both written as travelogues and diaries. Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, proceeds to break multiple rules on writing we now take for granted (Authorial intrusion, lengthy asides that would make Stephen King blush, telling critics to get stuffed before the end of Chapter 1 and repeating it throughout the book), keeps the one-head-per-scene rule for the most part. In a couple of fight scenes, he head hops, usually when one character lands a blow on another, then we get to feel everything the combatant feels and hear every inappropriate thought. After that?

Well, there’s Dickens, but there’s also Washington Irving and Mark Twain, both of whom are very much “Get to the friggin’ point!” authors. Much of Twain’s fiction is first person, but most of his third person keeps to one head per scene, particularly later on, like his last novel published in his lifetime, A Horse’s Tale. Before Fielding and his two diarist colleagues? Shakespeare and Milton. One wrote plays (by nature, dramatic until you hit a soliloquy), the other epic poems. (Imagine if Milton teamed up with Pratchett. Hoo boy!) But while other writers (Looking at you, Dickens and Hawthorne!) head hopped in their novels, one head per scene, if not the entire book, had already become the rule before Jefferson crammed on the Declaration of Independence the night before it was read.

“But, gee, TS, I want to show what the other character’s thinking, too.”

Ah, easy enough. Have the character react. Show, don’t tell. (My least favorite writing rule, but it’s hammered into writers for a reason.) If an innocent remark by Mark makes Cindy angry, you don’t need to get into Mark’s head. Have him act hurt when she voices anger and let Cindy interpret it. Or…

Scene break and jump into Mark’s head. Elmore Leonard sometimes wrote entire chapters of very short scenes ping-ponging between POV characters.

Remember, it’s all about the reader. And if you catch yourself doing it in the first draft, remember, that’s what revisions and rewrites are for. And your editor. I’m here to help.

*I edit. Therefore, I blog about it.

Open journal and pen.Originally posted to Reaper Edits

The biggest challenge for an editor comes from copy editing anthologies. With a novel, you have one or two writers’ styles from beginning to end. You adjust early on and carry it through to the end. Anthologies?

I received an assignment from a well-known short story writer and editor, himself a freelance editor. This came from our mutual publisher, which meant he had done some of the work already. I know. I’ve written for him and have had a couple of stories show up over the last two years in his books. So I’ve seen what happens before it lands on my desk on the other end. He loves editing short stories. Short fiction has been his passion for as long as I’ve known him. (About twenty years or so at this point.) Yet he said to me as I received the first of his anthologies from our publisher, “I’d rather have a spike through my head than edit an anthology.”

Still, I use his notes on editing as they’re useful.

We should spell out a couple of definitions here as anthology too often gets used interchangeably with collection. The two terms are not identical. A collection is a series of short stories or novellas by a single author or author team (like James SA Corey, who is actually the duo responsible for the Expanse series.) Think Stephen King’s recent You Like It Dark or his first collection, Night Shift. I have two coming out soon–The Compact Reader as TS Hottle and a collection of crime and suspense stories under the name Jim Winter. Whenever I publish a short story or stash a handful of scenes, I’m building a collection. There are already four stories set for a future Jim Winter collection.

An anthology is a collection of short stories and novellas by different writers, and there, the premise gets interesting. Many are the Best of… books you see about this time of year. (This is being published mid-October, 2024, and the Best ofs for this year are already poking their heads up as I write.) Some are in a shared universe, like Colin Conway’s 509 series. You write in the setting, but it’s his sandbox. Then there are the themed anthologies. Hoo boy, those are fun. Especially the music themed ones. Editor Brian Thornton did a pair of Steely Dan-themed anthologies, Die Behind the Wheel and A Beast Without a Name, that brought me back to crime fiction after about a seven-year absence. And let me tell you, as a writer, music-themed anthologies are fun, even when they go dark.

As an editor? Not so much. The average small-press anthology from crime fiction is usually 80-90 thousand words. Fair enough. That’s most crime novels. But unless the novelist is sloppy or uses me to get a final draft, I can breeze through a copy edit in about a week if the day job and real life cooperate. (It usually does.) Anthologies take longer. Because I may get a story from a well-known writer who works for a major daily, website, or magazine, and I’m usually “moving commas around.” But the next writer procrastinated and handed me the equivalent of the term paper written the night before it was due. So while I’m sailing through one story to the point where there are no track changes on two consecutive pages of prose, it takes me fifteen minutes just to get through the opening three paragraphs of the next. Slashing passive voice, same word starting every sentence (“He/she” and “I” are the most common offenders), and chopping up run-ons. But that’s every book, even the ones I barely touch anything.

The real challenge is the nature of the anthology itself, why my editor friend much prefers the therapeutic spike insertion in his skull. The style shifts, and you, as an editor, have to shift with it. For example, my first anthology was Gary Phillips’s effort based on the music of James Brown. Naturally, race enters into it. Fortunately, I know Gary well enough, so I asked him if he had a preference for how certain phrases and words were rendered. One of them was “black,” as in of African descent. Some writers capitalize it. Some don’t. And the race of the author doesn’t really give you any clues. One scifi writer I know, who is quite vocal about racial issues, doesn’t capitalize it. Yet another one, who’s just tossing something over the transom, will. Like numerals-vs.-words for numbers, every writer’s approach is a complicated calculus of experience, personal belief, and that old chestnut that trips me up as a writer, “That’s how I was always taught to do it.”

Another problem is some of the writers are lawyers. Most lawyers understand that I, the editor assembling the anthology, and the publisher are not Supreme Court Justices or even the mayor adjucating traffic tickets. In law, almost Everything is Capitalized, particularly if it’s repeated several times or is a generic term used to identify someone. However, some of them forget that’s not how anyone from Jonathan Franzen to Stephen King to Chuck Tingle writes. Franzen, King, and Tingle all have audiences with little overlap, but they all have audiences that have to read the damn thing they just wrote. (I’ll leave who does it best to you. Despite the rantings of the late Harold Bloom, it’s a purely subjective exercise. Your English teacher was wrong. So was your MFA advisor. I have spoken!) So, yes, lawyers sometimes have to be told they’re not writing a court brief. But they’re not the only ones. Scientists, IT geeks like me, writers who grew up on TikTok or even, as my son tried to teach me when he was a teen, 133t speak, have to be reminded you need commas and can’t just say, “He LOL’d that.” (And I probably just threw down the gauntlet for some GenZ genius who will prove me wrong. And right at the same time. Can’t wait to read what they write.)

So anthologies are, of course, fun to write. Collections can be a pain in the ass. Often the writer changes their mind mid-edit, which is really a good way to get dropped as a client or by a publisher if you abuse the privilege. Novels, of course, are novels. With dev edits, it’s a challenge, but that’s like making the walls straight, the concrete level, and the electricity grounded, to use a house-building metaphor. By the time a novel reaches the copy-editing stage, especially when a publisher has already touched it, it’s basically finding the punch list for the writer, if we can carry the building metaphor further.

Open journal and pen.Originally posted to Reaper Edits

You hear the terms developmental and copy edit bandied about. I talk a bit about the former here. These days, a lot of developmental editors are calling themselves “story coaches,” and that’s probably a more accurate term. Especially because, when the developmental edit is done, you will most definitely need a copy edit. All that adding, shifting, and deleting creates even more typos than you began with. I know. I went through a handful and… ouch.

Not every story requires a developmental edit. Most stories require some form of copy edit. Every story should be proofread. But what is a copy edit?

The term is a blanket one for three different types of edits that address the prose itself. It may drift into developmental territory if a structural problem is minor enough. For the most part, though, it’s there to get rid of repetition, maintain consistency, and, as I like to point out, trim the fat. But it encompasses three terms that blur into each other.

  • Scene Edit – This is a term I’ve not heard very much and sounds more like developmental territory. Scene editing is taking each scene and editing for consistency, clarity, and, most importantly, place in story. One thing I always do that falls under the scene editing umbrella is POV checking. Head hopping is a no-no in modern prose. There are four authors I’ve read who can get away with shifting the POV character within a scene, but they’re so smooth at it, you don’t notice. So, unless you’re SA Cosby, Stephen King, George Pelecanos, or Frank Herbert, stop that! (And Herbert should have stopped before he wrote God Emperor of Dune.) But also, I look for “drive-ups,” a term I got from a screenwriter who did away with a certain star’s demands for establishing scenes of him getting out of the car, locking the car, walking up to the house, and knocking on the door.
  • Copy Edit – This is more in-line with consistency. Are they Steve on Page 3 and suddenly Gwendolyn on page 98? Either there’s a gender identity issue you left out or Gwen’s messing with Steve’s stuff, and Steve (not to mention the reader) needs to know why. Also, this is where we look for repeated or overused words and that bane of all readers, the run-on sentence. Copy edits are a deeper dive than a simple proofread, but a lot of the basics of proofreading are covered in this process, as they are with…
  • Line Edit – This is more focused on the text itself. What’s the difference between line and copy editing? Line editing is more basic. You’re less likely to cut whole paragraphs at this point. It’s still more in-depth than a proofread as you’re still attacking repetition and overuse, but the editor will know if you’ve already done a lot of the more in-depth work.

So why the blanket term copy edit for all these? Well, when you get into a manuscript, you don’t know what’s going to be needed. Sometimes I “move commas around,” as I did for one author who works for a major national daily. Sometimes, I have to add a lot of comments, as with my first author for Down & Out, who’s been writing longer than I’ve been alive. It was obvious he expected a lot of notes back and thrives on working on deadlines. Those are extreme cases. (And I’ve done two more for that writer, so I must have done something right.)

Another thing to consider is where the manuscript is coming from. Down & Out sends me most of my manuscripts. So already a certain amount of work has been done, and having been edited as a writer by them, I know some of what they expect. But I also get a handful of manuscripts on referral or direct inquiry. I’m a little more strict on those as the author is frequently shopping for an agent or a publisher. So The Chicago Manual of Style must rule. That said, if a writer can send me a style sheet, it helps keeping things consistent.

The copy edit is the most common type of edit. Usually, the author knows their story, so it’s a matter of streamlining prose.