Authors vs Editors

Editors are the bane of an author’s life. Unfortunately, they’re also a necessity.

The worst possible thing any serious author can do is edit his/her own work. It’s not that you can’t see the errors or the glitchy prose. We’ve all written those passages and come back to them at a later date asking ourselves, “How many Tramadol had I taken when I wrote that?”

The problem with editing your own work is that you wrote it. You know what was in your mind, and as long as it’s not one of the aforementioned, Tramadol induced passages, it will always make sense to you.

I’m lucky. Not only is Maureen Vincent-Northam, my editor, an old friend, but she’s also a whodunit aficionado and since I write whodunits…

However, just because we’ve known each other since the internet was two tin cans joined together with a length of string, I don’t want to give the impression that I can get away with anything.

For those of you too young to understand that reference, when I was a lad, the simplest form of communication device was two tin cans tied to either end of a long piece of string. Try it some time. It’s fun.

Back to the plot: I get away with nothing. The spelling and grammar have to be correct, the prose must make sense, and the plot has to be tighter than my grip on a five pound note. Even when it’s obvious whodunit, the why must be well-hidden.

Take my latest project. It’s another STAC Mystery, aimed at Valentine’s Night 2013. (You may well have guessed that there are no holidays on the calendar that I will not exploit. The one after Valentine is targeted for Easter.) The script went off to Mo last week and came back to me yesterday. Correct all the typos, spelling and grammatical errors, and everything is fine, tickety-boo, but…

The plot is so transparent that if Mr Darcy wore it, he wouldn’t need to get wet to to kick the wife’s libido into overdrive.

Since it came back, emails have flowed back and forth across the ether so fast they’ve burned out the piece of string between the tin cans, but we now agree on how the thing should look when I’ve rewritten it.

If I’d been kamikaze enough to edit this myself, I might have put it out as it is and turned it from an average disaster into a full-blooded catastrophe.

And that is why we need editors. It means a lot of work for me (thanks Mo As if I didn’t have enough to do) but eventually, the reader gets a better deal.