Editing. Lets talk about that just a little bit. The previous two posts I put up today are rehashes: our latest great book for young teens, and PYPs attempts at quality. But editing - this is a wonderfully wide and somewhat profound topic. A few questions one might ask are: Besides the 3 levels of editing, what do we need to know? How does one learn to edit well? Does editing really make or break a book? Good questions. Lets look at one aspect of the first, that copyediting will ultimately make or break a book (as will line editing). Copyediting is more than checking for typos, adding a comma here or there, and correcting quotation marks - are they pointing the right way? Yes, its that and more, much more. To me, copyediting is even more than knowing the CMOS backwards and forward and following it to a T. Its more than editors being consistent through all books put out by a certain press. Its this: Smart copyediting is copyediting for individual books based on the authors intent and style. For example, the average unlearned copyeditor would have taken Cormac McCarthys brilliant The Road and turned it into just another book - the partial sentences, the lack of punctuation, the cramming together of too much in a paragraph where ordinary books would have them split. Or how about one of PYPs shortlisted titles, one which we may yet acquire: no quotation marks at all on dialog, but very well done and quite brilliant, as far as Ive read thus far. My point is this: the growing copyeditor will learn to adapt for true author style (not just author lapses) and book aim. Who was the book written for? If middle grade readers, I doubt if The Road would have gone over well. Make sense so far? More later. Stepping away from the computer to work.
Posted on: Tue, 11 Mar 2014 15:46:25 +0000
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