Be Your Own Editor

Here’s something I’ve always wondered about—and maybe some of you, and you know who you are, can enlighten me—what’s the deal with bad handwriting? I don’t mean writing that’s not perfectly, anal-retentively neat. I’m talking scribblin’, scrawlin’, needs-a-cryptologist-to-decipher messy. In my job, I work on hard copies of manuscripts and page proofs, on which up to five different people have sometimes written edits (in lots of pretty colors!). Invariably, at least three of those five can’t write a “Q” that looks like a “Q.” Is it simple carelessness? Are they so accustomed to looking at their own script that, to them, it appears legible? Why am I bringing this up, anyway?

Because, to me, it’s about taking care. And about having respect for the person at the receiving end of your work. See, I like to think I do a good job as a production editor. I can help make a book better. But if an editor or an author doesn’t have enough respect for my time to write on a manuscript so that I can read the edits, I won’t request to work with that person again, no matter how good the book might be.

Broaden the principle, and it applies to your interactions with literary agents and book editors. Don’t send them twenty unnecessary e-mails or a book proposal that takes twenty pages to get to the point. In short, don’t waste their time, no matter how worthy of it you think you are. No one in the book business wants to work with a writer who is so caught up in writing that they consider common professionalism something they don’t need to care about. Smart people—agents, editors, publicists who are good at their jobs—will want to work with you if you demonstrate respect for their time and their professionalism.

What’s the equivalent of messy handwriting for an aspiring author (besides messy handwriting)? Typos and other errors in a query letter. A manuscript printed in tiny, unreadable type because you want agents and editors to think your manuscript is shorter than it really is. (They won’t be fooled. They’ll just be pissed.) Beliving you’r too cool to wory about things sech as spelling. (How annoying was it to read that sentence?) Taking care while you write, and read, is the theme of Francine Prose’s wonderful new book Reading Like a Writer, which I’ll be reviewing in more detail soon.

Apply this principle to your readers, as well. They’re on the receiving end of your writing, and they should be respected. Don’t waste their time with sloppy sentences, lazy cliches, underdeveloped characters. Don’t fall down on the writing job after your first break—work even harder to build the respect you’ve earned from both your readers and your book business associates. You think just because you’ve been published, you’re entitled to respect indefinitely from the reading public or from your publishing house? It’s a two-way street.

Some of the editors and authors I work with, even the big-shot ones, don’t practice that kind of careful professionalism. For that matter, even some experienced freelance copyeditors lose the will to take care. They have no shortage of work, so why be meticulous about it? Here’s why: if they send me back a sloppily copyedited manuscript, I won’t hire them next time. Or I’ll hire them to edit a less interesting, less important book. And if an author makes things tough on my reading eyes once, I’ll be less inclined to hire the best copyeditor for their next book. So while people often get away with using that illegible scrawl because no one will call them on it, sooner or later, it will come back to bite them… though they might not even know it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 12th, 2006 at 3:22 am and is filed under The Book Business, Writing/Editing Tips: The Big Picture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.