Editing: A Primer

People are sometimes puzzled about what their manuscript needs. Does it require editing, and if so, what kind? Or is an evaluation called for? Would I benefit from coaching during the writing process itself?

Developmental, Substantive, and Line Editing

There are no clear lines between these tasks. One often blends into the next. The big-picture issues—like developing the manuscript’s scope, structure, and content—inevitably filter down to the sentence level, where grammar, punctuation, syntax, and style, like loyal footsoldiers, have to carry out the book’s mission.

An author I worked with, a psychologist, discovered that teaching her clients to swear had a therapeutic effect. It got them to break the rules about propriety, vent their frustration (at themselves) and move on from wherever it was they were stuck. At the conceptual and structural level of the book she was writing about this technique, that all made sense. The problem was which swear words to use and how often—an entire book of foul language would distract from the point. On the other hand, timidly omitting them out would be self-defeating. What’s the point of sanitizing a book about swearing? In the end, we focused on a few choice obscenities and used them judiciously. Although I was squeamish about having my author, a distinguished Ph.D., blaspheme all over the place, one of the juicier profanities ended up right in the title when a publisher bought her manuscript.

Copyediting and Proofreading

I have never seen a request for proofreading that was really only that. When authors say they want their copy proofed, they usually mean they want their writing copy and line-edited, and sometimes more than that (“While you’re at it, please make sure everything’s in the right order and it all makes sense!”) To explain the difference, I would say that proofreading is to copyediting as light dusting is to vacuuming. (To extend the metaphor, editing is more like first straightening up the house).

Manuscript Evaluation

 Manuscript evaluations are useful when an author does not know if what they have produced is a strong final draft or a ream of paper ready for recycling, or something in between. An evaluation can confirm the author’s concept or send it off in a new direction. Evaluations can also save authors money by pointing out problems they can fix themselves before they hire an editor.

A man approaching elderhood, who lived a successful life and helped others prosper, decided he wanted to write down his philosophy, a group of reflections on service, forgiveness, abundance, and gratitude. But more than a systematic treatise, his writing reminded me of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Emperor whose brief, pithy, profound thoughts on character and virtue produced one of the great books of the Ancient World. I proposed in the evaluation we do something along those lines and rather than a work of philosophy, we did a book of days, with a few hundred words for each calendar day and some lines for readers to add their own reflections. This also worked nicely with the author’s writing style—he preferred to write a little each day in the morning—and over a number of months we successfully gathered a year’s worth of these “meditations” under a few broad topics.

Another author wrote a book with a very detailed prescription for how to save America from decline by radically decentralizing the government and restoring local control. The author had a complex program for decision making and voting, even for revising the Constitution. I thought some of the ideas had merit until I realized the contradiction inherent in having a master plan for local control! The two impulses seemed to be at war within the author! That insight became a lynchpin of my evaluation, and later of the author’s revisions.

Coaching

Coaching can take a lot of forms—giving encouragement, untangling a difficult section of a book, listening as an author expresses frustration. It may also be a kind of project management. (“Help. What do I do next?!”)

Recently, I was working with someone who wrote a novel based on her difficult life experience, though one with a happy ending. But the novel had only thinly disguised her own story, which was plenty gripping on its own, and it was clear as I read that the material would work far better as a memoir. These were intense and at times painful tales, with inherent drama. The author didn’t need to make up any details or fill them out with characters. She just needed to get it down on paper. Ironically, writing her story first as fiction gave her the emotional distance she needed to delve back into the past and recover and heal from her experience. The coaching, in this case, allowed me to reflect back to her what I felt was especially compelling, what I felt readers would want to know more about, where a detail seemed extraneous or needed fleshing out. My role was largely as a sounding board as the chapters poured right out of her.  And once they had, I was able to suggest how to tie them together.

Nonnative English Speakers

Working with nonnative English speakers writing in English can require intuition, detective work, back and forth with the author (“Did you mean….?), and a general knowledge of how things may go amiss for someone thinking in one language and writing in another, something I’ve experienced myself as a student of other languages.

On retirement, an Israeli psychiatrist wrote a long, fascinating study of the evolutionary origins of mental illness—and of how it’s a natural byproduct of the way human societies have evolved.  It was a subject he’d been studying his whole life. The only problem was that the author grew up in Romania, was educated in German, had emigrated at a young age to Israel, and was writing in English. As he put it, he had no “first” language. He worked with a pile of dictionaries on his desk— and though his thoughts were crystal clear, it fell to me to break up his elegant, paragraph-long sentences and sort out the syntax, an immensely satisfying job, as it turned out, because of the extreme clarity of his mind, despite the language barrier.

My areas of focus include:

• Self-help
• Memoir and autobiography
• Psychology
• Philosophy and social science
• Education
• Law, government, and politics
• Religion and spirituality
• Health and wellness
• General nonfiction