Editorial Advice: To Listen Or Not To Listen?
- Posted by Essays Blog in Essays Blog |
- December 9th, 2008 |
- Comments
Whether you’re an author publishing finished conventional means or delving into self-publishing, you are going to deprivation the feedback of a good editor or perhaps more than one. The difficulty for authors, especially those choosing self-publishing is when do you accept an editor’s advice and make changes and when do you determine you’ve gotten enough feedback? This can be a bad call, and it often comes down to the author finding a happy medium.
The first abstraction writers need to consider is how many editors are also many? In writing and researching Spectacles of Darkness, Spectacles of Grace, over the duration of the project VII editors reviewed the manuscript. Any of them were extremely helpful, action an objective approach and offering suggestions that made for a better book. Others seemed to check objectivity at the door, letting their personal likes and dislikes influence how they felt the account should develop. By the time the book was completed, I felt as tho’ I had let also many cooks into the kitchen, all fussing over the same pot, either adding spices or removing them.
What I learned from the editors I consulted were cardinal simple things. One, you cannot make everyone happy. It’s just not possible, so you compose the best activity you can, one that as many reader’s as possible can relate to. Number cardinal, as an author you finally have to decide if the suggestions editors make are enhancing your activity, or movement it into the activity of individual else. Again, it goes back to the idea of authors finding a happy medium that improves the activity, but is allay your own.
The first editor I contacted was probably the most beneficial. Prudy loved the book, but cerebration it should begin with the hymeneals because she believed this was where the account truly started. She also advisable plotting the account on a calendar over the circumstantial number of years the novel took place. In this artifact, real life events could be woven end-to-end the narrative, giving the reader not only a meaning of place and time, but information that might arouse their interest in other areas related to the account.
Another editor’s feedback was more helpful regarding distance to improve my writing, rather than this particular account. She pointed out little tics in my communication &ndash for example exploitation the same morpheme also often, advice which I didn’t just apply to the novel, but every other piece I’ve written. Her observation helped me expand my cognition and fine-tune my activity. Cardinal suggestions I took issue with was the fact that in the novel Kay and Tim don’t have any children, and that as a minister’s woman, this editor felt Kay should be shown in church more. I cerebration both points had nothing to do with the account and verged on stereotyping. I made this decision from my own experience of knowing childless couples where a mate works in ministry.
One positive aspect of consulting multiple editors is that enough voices may convince an author to make a big change. Out of VII editors, cardinal craved to accompany the ending beefed up providing the reader with an enhanced meaning of spirit and closure. The one holdout was a good friend and her argument was that by expanding the ending, the author was action the reader by the hand, when she felt their imagination could do the rest. Of all the decisions I made regarding Spectacles of Darkness, this was by far the toughest. Eventually I relented and importantly revised the ending.
Authors may also find themselves confronted with one editor who changes something, only to encounter another who changed it back. This was particularly accurate when dealing with the grammatical aspects of the book. The 2nd editor was an old-school English major, so her placement of commas was more extensive. The fifth editor removed what she believed were also many commas and thusly we had a full-scale “Comma Action.” When the last editor reviewed the manuscript, edited commas were being replaced. What I strongly recommend is authors superior a circumstantial grammatical communication (much as the Chicago Manual of Communication or Modern Language Association) and follow it.
Finally, regardless of what an editor suggests, as the author you need to remember this is a personal process. The final editor made a persuasion that would have entailed rewriting the entire manuscript in a artifact that I felt was not beneficial to the account. But because I cerebration the persuasion had any merit, I compromised and trimmed the environment to a point where I felt comfortable, thereby finding a happy medium.