How Much Do You Enjoy Being Edited?

From Nano to Publication – The Editing Process

My last year’s Nano novel, All in the Mind, was published on October 29th, nearly a year after I began writing it. It went through some vicissitudes on the way and very nearly fell at the last post.
I successfully (I believe) researched all those areas I was shaky on; several wonderful fellow authors answered my Twitter call to help me with that I was least confident about, Hindu culture; and a dozen or so fellow authors, including two professional editors and two English teachers read it before I submitted it for publication. I was as confident as I could be that it was near perfect.
Imagine, then, my surprise and horror when it came back with page after page of ‘corrections’. The editor had virtually re-written my precious manuscript!

I disagreed with virtually all the changes, many of which, I am sure were made in an attempt to fulfil the new fashionable rules which are being imposed on authors. I discussed these at some length in the following article: http://jademystique.blogspot.com.es/?...

But, briefly, they are as follows:
1. All books written in English must be put into US English.
2. Stories should be limited to one point of view.
3. All ‘unnecessary’ words (such as adverbs) should be stripped out of the narrative.
4. The past tense should only be expressed using the preterit (simple past).

You will be aware that the truly great authors do not follow these rules. So why are we expected to? And where did they come from?
I can only imagine they have been invented by teachers of creative writing, probably in a vain attempt to produce formulae which will result in good writing from their students.

This is a similar approach to that adopted by sales companies some years ago. In the mistaken belief that bad salespeople could sell if they only said the right things, they introduced the sales script. The hapless would-be salespeople had to slavishly follow this script, which was cleverly created by a psychologist and designed to lead the prospective buyer inexorably to saying ‘yes’.
Did you experience any of these calls? They didn’t work. They didn’t work because the prospective customers did NOT follow the script. They would ask the wrong question and leave the poor salesperson floundering and unable to carry on. Those who were clever enough to lead the customer back to the script were, of course, clever enough to sell without a script!

These days those poor salespeople have to a large extent been replaced by robots. Companies still believe they can replace real, intelligent, empathetic people with machines programmed to answer questions. Anyone who has ever telephoned PayPal or Ryanair, or virtually any modern company will have experienced the frustration of an electronic voice asking you to give your account number, to repeat it, making you choose from a variety of irrelevant options, none of which include speaking to a real person, then being referred back to the main menu.
Contact by internet will refer you to the FAQs page, and, if you click on email, being asked to choose from a list of subjects, none of which bears any relationship to your problem, then being referred back to the FAQs page. If you are really lucky they will give you a virtual operator who will … refer you back to the FAQs page. The result being that even if you eventually get to speak to a real person you are by then so angry that you have another complaint to add to your original one. Companies must lose huge numbers of customers this way but they still haven’t learnt.

The moral is:
You can’t make bad salespeople into good ones by making them follow a script. You can’t give good customer service if you replace real people with robots and you can’t make bad writers good by making them follow a set of ridiculous rules.
The whole point of creative writing is that it doesn’t have rules, other than those of grammar. That’s why it’s called creative writing.

What is truly frightening is that writers and editors seem to have swallowed this claptrap wholesale.

When it comes to editing, we should be careful to discriminate between editing and proof-reading. Every writer needs proof-reading, which consists of finding and correcting spelling mistakes; and continuity, typographical and grammatical errors, which do have rules.
Editing is rather more subtle. It is a matter of style. Good writers need little or no editing.
It takes a very brave editor to edit an author who is a better writer than they are. But, armed with their ‘infallible’ rules, even the most appalling writers believe they know how to improve on other people’s writing.

It’s time to throw these rules out of the window and stop restricting our writers. And it’s high time writers stopped taking any notice of these daft ideas. Just hit the ‘reject all changes’ button and proof-read it yourself.