By Stephen Cashmore
You have finished your latest book, which for the purposes of this discussion we will say is a novel called Masterpiece – because of course, that’s what it is. We have all been there. Just as soon as you finish writing your book, or short story or whatever, you are perfectly sure that it is the best thing that has ever been written by anyone. Anywhere. Fact. Every word is perfectly judged; every sentence is perfectly weighted; the plot is supreme and the characters just leap off the page into life. You have read through Masterpiece a couple of times and corrected a handful of typos, but now you are sure that it is perfect.
Been there, done that, there ought to be a T-shirt.
Still, you remember hearing that at this stage every serious writer puts their work into a drawer for a while – for months, if they can stand the wait – to let the initial adrenaline-fuelled excitement of having finished die down a little. Perhaps even give the book to a beta reader, or a friend who you know will give an honest opinion, to get some early feedback on this brilliant book you have created. You are sure they will sing its praises, but still: better safe than sorry.
Two months later you retrieve Masterpiece from the folder on your PC where you temporarily archived it and happily start to read it again. You find a couple of grammatical mistakes in the first few pages. Ah well, minor stuff. The name of one of the characters mysteriously changes on page fifty. Oops; still, Find and Replace will correct that easily enough. You notice that another character is always talking ‘sullenly’ or ‘grumpily’ or ‘sulkily’ and it begins to grate on your nerves. Damn, you really ought to change or, better still, delete some of these.
Your PC makes a pinging noise and an email appears from your friend or beta reader. Dear You, it begins. Sorry for the delay, but I found it quite hard to finish your book. I quite liked the overall premise, but
You stop reading at this point. Sentences of the form ‘I quite liked this, but’ always went on to give chapter and verse to explain why the reader didn’t, in fact, like it. And you can see that this email goes on for quite a way. You might even have to scroll down to read it all, so it’s an unusually long email. Of course, one person’s view doesn’t necessarily mean much, but you are beginning to feel decidedly uneasy. Better get back to reading Masterpiece.
You start to notice a superfluity of other adverbs, many of them repeating. In fact, in at least three instances you notice that the dialogue itself is a repeat from a chapter or so ago. A lot happens in chapters eight and nine, but the reader only learns about it because one character tells another one all about it, over a cup of coffee. The phrase ‘show, not tell’ flits across your mind. Plus this was about the tenth time characters have met up over a cup of coffee to have a discussion. A major character is introduced about three-quarters of the way through – you remember you had to introduce her to fix a plot hole you had noticed two months ago – but her sudden appearance now looks rather odd, and you feel weirdly certain that a reader will think, ‘Aha, he invented Grace to fix the plot hole, but where was she for the previous nine chapters?’
And…
Suddenly you realise that Masterpiece, is not, in fact, a masterpiece. It needs quite a bit of work done to it. And you are not sure that you feel up to doing whatever is needed. Well, perhaps you could actually do it, but you are not completely sure what needs doing. You need some professional help and, luckily, there’s plenty of it out there. Here we will focus on the three main sources of help, and explain what they do and the differences between them:
· developmental editors
· copy-editors
· proofreaders.
Development editors
Let’s assume the worst, that Masterpiece really is a complete muddled mess and needs a fundamental overhaul. It’s worth pointing out that the need for a developmental edit isn’t always as obvious as it’s turned out to be for Masterpiece. Ideally, a writer or a publisher ought always to ask a developmental editor to take a look through a manuscript, because their professional appraisal might throw up problems that neither writer nor agent or publisher realised were there.
However, this increasingly doesn’t happen, simply because of cost constraints. So we will just use the example of Masterpiece; a book that has clearly left the rails not just once but several times, and ask a developmental editor to give you some advice.
What does a developmental editor do?
Let’s start by saying that a developmental editor doesn’t look for grammatical errors, spelling mistakes or poor punctuation – the fiddly bits. The fiddly bits come later. Scott Norton, in his book Developmental Editing, says:
…developmental editing denotes significant structuring or restructuring of a manuscript’s discourse.
In other words, if you decide to employ a developmental editor, they will look at the big picture and ask questions such as:
· Do the characters seem realistic?
· Is the dialogue smooth and consistent between characters?
· Is the plot coherent and sufficiently strong to carry the story?
· Is the world-building or just general scene-setting believable?
And a whole lot more. You will end up with remarks and suggestions such as:
· The Prologue isn’t needed. Small alterations would make it suitable for Chapter 1.
· The Prologue sets up a scene which never subsequently takes place. Either the Prologue should be deleted, or the scene incorporated into the later parts of the text. Note that Prologues are going out of fashion nowadays.
· Vince is not needed. You could usefully combine what he says and does with George, and do away with Vince altogether.
· Why doesn’t Mei call the police immediately? This is a glaring omission that undermines the whole of the rest of the book.
· Not much happens in Chapter 5. You could put its initial paragraphs at the end of Chapter 4 and its final paragraphs at the start of what is now Chapter 6, and delete most of the existing Chapter 5.
· There is a lot of info-dumping, particularly in Chapters 3, 7 and 8. Remember to ‘Show, not Tell’. Examples attached.
· After the climax in Chapter 12, the final two chapters are just characters talking to give you the chance to tie up loose ends. These loose ends should either be tied up as part of the climax, or simply left loose.
· I attach a timeline of the events that take place in the book. You tell the events in green as flashbacks, but I do not see that this adds to the story. Suggest you just tell the story in linear fashion.
You get the idea. Developmental editors will take apart the structure of a book, dissect its characters, time flow, world-building, and deliver criticisms and suggestions for improvement. Tactfully, of course. I’m not being especially tactful in this blog post.
Copy-editing
Let’s assume you got a developmental editor to tell you all the things you need to do to improve Masterpiece, or that you plucked up courage and told yourself, with the help of your friend or beta reader. You put the improved version back into the archive folder and did something else for a couple of months.
If nothing else, this process makes you realise why it can take so long to get a book into shape, ready for submission to an agent or publisher. Four months have already gone by and you haven’t even got to copy-editing or proofreading yet. And that’s time on top of however long it took you to write Masterpiece in the first place.
But we digress. When you extract this second version of the book from the archive folder and read it through, you are pleasantly surprised at how much better it is. It all seems more real, somehow. But you still spot the occasional grammatical error; there are some spelling mistakes, many of which exist as a result of an over-enthusiastic Word spell-checker; and the punctuation occasionally goes wonky, especially in scenes that involve dialogue. A few other things occur to you: some words don’t feel right, and it might in fact be that they don’t mean quite what you thought they did. Still too many adverbs. You notice that at one point you have written He nodded his head, and reflect that, really, what else could he have nodded? Maybe there are other instances of this kind of spurious description?
A copy-editor will focus on the fiddly bits that a developmental editor will ignore – grammatical errors, spelling mistakes and poor punctuation. The Chartered Institute of Editors and Proofreaders (CIEP) writes on its website that copy-editing is
preparing the copy so it is ready for the next stage of the publishing process, usually in a digital version of the text. Tasks include ensuring grammar, punctuation and spelling are correct…
The definition goes on to explain how a copy-editor will leave instructions for a typesetter, which don’t apply to Masterpiece, because it’s not being fed through the traditional publishing process at this point. Incidentally, you can now see why a copy-editor is called a copy-editor. It’s because they edit the copy; the ‘copy’ is the original manuscript, in our example, the developmentally edited Masterpiece.
A good copy-editor will also point out those words that don’t seem right, and will flag up ambiguous or awkward sentences. You can discuss with a copy-editor just how far they can go in making changes. Those adverbs. You could ask the copy-editor to highlight or change or delete those that seem to be unnecessary or which ring the repetition bell. You could ask the copy-editor to look out for anything that you think it would be useful to look out for, although remember that the more you add to a remit, the longer it will take to complete, and so the more it will cost.
It's worth pointing out that it’s very hard to copy-edit your own book. This is for two reasons. First, you know what you have written and you know what it all means, and that is what you will read on the page, even to the extent of your brain filling in missing words or understanding what a paragraph means when everyone else would be completely baffled by it. Second, deep down you still think this is probably one of the best books ever written. You simply can’t abide the thought of making changes to your writing or, worse, actually deleting parts of it. No, you really need someone to take an impartial view; someone who knows what they are doing.
Let’s assume you find a decent copy-editor and ask them to:
· check the usual suspects of grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, and incorrect punctuation;
· point out awkward or ambiguous phrases or sentences; and
· highlight adverbs that could usefully be changed or axed.
Let’s further assume that you get Masterpiece back with all this marked up for you, and you accept some 95% of the copy-editors changes and suggestions, and are feeling very pleased with yourself. Masterpiece is so much better than it was four months ago, when you thought it was the most perfect thing ever written.
What’s left?
Proofreading
Once a book has been copy-edited, it should be ready for publication, so the next stage is for it to be typeset. If you are self-publishing, this means you have to decide what book format you want to use, and this determines what the consequent page size has to be. You can play around with different typefaces to see what most pleases you. You might get someone else to do all this for you – there are plenty of people out there who are experts at this sort of thing. If you manage to go down the traditional publishing route, you can leave all these decisions to the publisher.
Either way, once the book is typeset, it should then be proofread. Why? For three reasons, the third of which is probably the most important.
· No copy-editor is perfect. No copy-editor will guarantee to pick up 100% of errors and other infelicities in a manuscript. The proofreader should pick up about 90% of whatever the copy-editor might have missed, steering the final typeset version closer to perfection.
· The typesetter might have made errors in the typesetting. One good example occurs in that perennial favourite The Hobbit (HarperCollins paperback edition, 2006), where the last page of the story (p351) has the header CHAPTER TITLE instead of THE LAST STAGE. *
· The typesetting might have been done perfectly well, but introduced some layout bloopers. For example, the copy-editor might have changed
Tall and lean, the wizard’s reputation soon grew until he was a legend over the entire continent.
to
The wizard was tall and lean, and his reputation soon grew until he was a legend over the entire continent.
and then the typesetting rendered this as
The wizard was tall and lean, and his reputation soon grew until he was a leg-
end over the entire continent.
A proofreader will also look out for what are known as widows and orphans (a widow is where the last line of a paragraph appears at the top of the next page, and an orphan is where the first line of a paragraph or a heading appears at the foot of a page), and for other things such as paragraph indents disappearing, chapter headings being in the wrong font… and so on. The CIEP** defines proofreading as
reading and marking up the ‘proofs’ of a text to fix any problems in layout and design; errors introduced during typesetting; or mistakes missed during copyediting. It is the final stage before the text is released for publication, so the proofreader should not be looking to improve the writing style, layout or any other aspect of the text, and needs to take into account the effects of any changes they mark and how they will fit into the existing page layout.
So essentially a proofreader looks for the usual suspects, just like a copy-editor, but does it on the final, typeset version of the book. It’s now worth pointing out that proofreading your own book is even harder than copy-editing it. For goodness sake, you know what words are on the page; you wrote them. You could probably recite most of them off by heart. And that, of course, is the problem. You read what you know you meant to write, not necessarily what you have actually written.
Increasingly, copy-editing and proofreading are being conjoined and publishers expect both to be done at the same time, and independent authors try to do the same. But even if it has been decided that this is the way to go, don’t forget to work on the typeset version if possible, for the reasons just listed.
Summary
A developmental editor will suggest big, sweeping changes to your novel, most of which will seem horrible to you. But a good developmental editor can work wonders; they can turn average manuscripts into above-average manuscripts although, of course, they can’t do the writing for you. They can only make helpful suggestions. You have to implement them.
A copy-editor looks at the fiddly bits. A good copy-editor will get rid of almost all the grammatical, spelling and punctuation errors in the book, and will help by flagging up ambiguity or awkwardness in the detailed writing. And will flag up other possible problems if you ask them to.
A proofreader checks for grammatical, spelling and punctuation errors too, and also for various layout problems caused by the typesetting. A proofreader is often seen as the last guardian at the gate; once a proofread is done, the book is published and it’s too late then to spot and make any changes.
* For amusement, check out more published errors at http://cashmoreeditorial.com/errata.php
** If you decide you want to find a decent developmental editor, copy-editor or proofreader, you can do not better than check out the Directory at CIEP (https://www.ciep.uk/ )