Timothy's Thoughts

E diting is one of those things that is a staple of the publishing industry, but what is its purpose and how should it be handled? We’ve all heard stories of editors who went through a manuscript and changed just about everything. We’ve also heard authors talk about how they look forward to working with an editor because they know that writing is a cooperative effort and their manuscript will be improved with the input of others. Personally, I think that is mostly aspiring authors trying to impress agents with how grown up they are, but they say it nonetheless. My question is, should we even be looking at editing in that way? Publishers Want Good Work If you want to make a publisher’s day, walk into his office with a flawless manuscript that includes a great story and the name of a well known author on the cover. He’ll love you even more if it is already typeset and ready to go to press. But walk into his office with a great story that still needs quite a bit of editing and he’ll pass....

O n Facebook the other day, I saw a conversation the made me think. You may have seen it too, but an author who is in the process of revising a book based on an editor's suggestions asked the question of whether it would be better to say "came barreling out of nowhere" or "barreled out of nowhere." The author had originally written "came barreling out of nowhere," but the editor had flagged it and suggested that he write "barreled out of nowhere" on the grounds that barreled is a stronger verb. I think the author finally decided to go along with the editor , but I’m going to make the argument that the author should have suggested the editor go take a hike . The first reason we should favor came barreling over barreled in this case is that we would never say “barreled out of nowhere” in everyday speech. I’ll get to why we wouldn’t say that in a moment, but for now, if normal people wouldn’t say something then our characters probably wou...

Q uick! What's the purpose of an editor? There are many different functions involved in the making of a book. You have the author, the agent, the printer and many others, including the editor . Actually, there may be several editors, but for our purposes, let’s lump them all into one category. We think we know what this guy does. He edits the book, right? No, this isn’t a trick question; that’s what he does. Well, unless he’s an acquisitions editor, in which case he may not actually edit the book, but that’s a different issue. The editor we want to consider today is the guy who edits the book. On another blog I saw a comment from an author saying, in essence, that it is the job of the writer to craft a story, but it isn’t really the job of the writer to revise the story. That, the commenter, claimed is the job of the editor, who is supposed to take whatever the author puts out there and turn it into a bestseller. That got me thinking. That is how we think of editors, at times. The ...

If you are like me, you commonly switch words like were and where , there and they’re , envelop and envelope . It would be nice if the grammar checker would find all of these mistakes, but it sometimes leaves much to be desired. I won’t tell you about all of my mistakes, since I don’t want you going through my work looking for them, but I will say that I have made quite a few. With some of these mistakes, such as using the word puck instead of puke in my current work in progress, it is nearly impossible to find the mistake unless you just happen to notice it. I don’t know how many times I looked at the word puck and read it as puke . For some reason, I looked at the word this last time through and realized I had used the wrong word. One of the most effective methods I have found for eliminating word usage errors is to use the find and replace feature. I will search for every instance of a word in the document and verify that the correct word is used. If it is not, I will repl...