On Editing – Author's Voice

It is extremely difficult to edit your own work, especially if you wrote it days or only hours earlier. Even waiting a few weeks to a month may not be long enough to fully detach yourself from the writerly flow to be an effective self-editor. There is a mystical process between muse->brain->keyboard (or pen or pencil, depending on your particular flavor of this mythos) that is far too personal a communion to be able to step back and look at the entirety of "the big picture" – tiny facets of it, yes, because all authors should be able to edit grammar, mechanics, and make certain their intentions are carried through loud and clear. But a story needs more than just flashes of brilliance and overall coherence that every author should be able to impart. It needs consistency, and a high-quality with an eye on the audience that simply can't be achieved to the fullest potential in a self-edit.

Which is why I feel it's important for a book to be edited by someone who can not only see that "big picture" while the story is in draft form, but can help get it there without costing the author their voice. And no, not a friend who "took some writing classes", not a loved-one who "wants to help", not the businessman that has you house sitting or walking his dog, and not even "the friend who got published" because there are certain things an editor will do better than even a fellow writer. Every author who is serious about their craft learned long ago that first drafts are little better than toilet paper when it comes to evaluating them as being publishable right now. It can sometimes even be difficult to convince an agent, publisher, or even editor, that a story is publishable at all – or at least that that it's worth the time to get it into publishing shape. So what really matters is showing a story's potential, and then being pushed to make that potential become a reality.

I say this because every story I've ever read has always had some redeeming quality. People who decide to write do so for reasons more numerous than number of words in the longest book ever written, but the most common thread between all of them is having a gem of an idea (or a character, or a scene) that made them not just want to write, but actually put out the words.

There's a lot that can be said about editing in general, but today I want to focus on author's voice.

Every author has a voice. Some are more well defined than others, usually because they've been writing for a longer amount of time, but even the greenest writer has some level of voice developed. The thing about editors is that they can, in an effort to clarify or bring out a part of a story's potential or shift it into a more genre-sympathetic method of phrasing, overwrite the author's voice with their own. In the case of a young writer, they might not know how to interpret this sort of change to their prose, or not know what the end-goal of edits should be – they're not just to make certain all the i's are dotted and all the t's are crossed, but to produce prose that conveys, to the intended reader, the simplest and clearest images of the story, the characters, and the facets of a single scene that are important for that "big picture" I've been mentioning. The individual importance of each of those things will often vary from scene to scene, adding another layer of mystery to the whole editing process that can be just as difficult to explain as a writer's communion between muse->brain->keyboard.

And it's important to know that not all editors are created equal. Neither are authors, but that is often less of a dispute when it comes to the business of writing. Editors spend a great deal of time perfecting their craft, just like authors, but in very different ways than authors do. Editors need to know what the standard practices are in a given genre, such as how readers are familiar with visualizing prose, as well as a more-than-general knowledge of grammar and mechanics currently being used in the industry. They also need to have an in-depth appreciation of how a reader will "hear" and then "see" the things being conveyed by the words in a story. (Authors can be knowledgeable about all of those things too, but reference the first sentence of this post for why it is important to have editors too.) Editors especially need to be able to see any inconsistencies the intended audience will see, and then have the knowledge of how to actively address the problems before readers are given the story. Authors, when receiving edits, need to know the difference between an edit given for clarification, an edit given for grammar, and an edit given because there was something that needed to be changed so a reader can see what that particular moment of the story needed them to see.

For an example of editor vs. author regarding something that was not mechanical or grammatical in the sense of classroom learning: In EotS, I had a difficult time convincing Peter that a hyphen, not an ellipsis, was the standard notation for a line of dialogue being interrupted harshly. Whenever I changed an individual instance, it would come to me in the next draft altered back to the ellipsis. Eventually, I told myself I'd get to them when we were done with the damn thing so I didn't lose any sleep over something so small. It was a shame, because I think a few of the hyphens are still incorrectly done as an ellipsis even in the final version – something that could have been avoided had I been able to explain the importance of the notation in a way that convinced Peter to stop altering them back. My failure as an editor was to let myself get into that position, which I now know for next time. (Different kind of learning.)

On the plus side, Peter's voice is entirely intact throughout the book. If you read through EotS, I doubt you'd be able to tell which sections I rewrote. It's one of the things I learned while editing that I'm rather pleased to be able to brag about – I hardly ever alter the author's voice, preferring, and able, to work within what was given to me. If I can't, and I start seeing my voice in the prose, I stop editing and simply ask for a rewrite to address the issue(s) I'd been trying to work through. The edits that matter most are often not about the delivery of a single sentence, but are about the delivery of the sentence before and the sentence after effecting how the reader will "hear" the sentence in question within their mind. Editors need to be careful they don't put their own voice into the mix and accidentally add another layer of "fog" to how a reader will hear the entirety of the paragraph or scene. It can easily ruin the story – the opposite of helping it like an editor should do.

So, authors, you need to find an editor that can compliment your voice, but you definitely need an editor. When you find one, if you aren't comfortable with how your words are being changed, then speak up and ask questions. The more you know about why editors do what they do is more that you can improve as an individual writer. Those sorts of improvements will reduce the amount of things editors need to rewrite in your future work, and thus can avoid the most common instances of unintentional voice-mixing. This will also leave the editors more time to focus on how to bring your story to its full potential in regard to "the big picture".

As an excercize, if you want and because I think it could be fun: Write a [short] scene about someone being in a place they've never been before. The challenge: you cannot use the words "has not been there before" (or any variation thereof) to convey that fact to the reader. Post it in the comments here and I'll offer feedback.

As always, thanks for reading.

J.R.