Previously on Game of Tomes
Mad scientists must science madly. It is their nature. In my A Game of Edits post, I confessed to not applying appropriate controls to the experimental changes in my writing process between Rather’s Enzyme and The Gray God.
Having learned about patterns of weakness and error in The Gray God via AutoCrit, I unlocked the manuscript for Raether’s Enzyme and applied the tool there. The results were generally good, but I knew that I had introduced at least one new class of error, which I resolved to leave for the freelance copyeditor to find. Mostly this was just laziness my part.
Two for the Price of Two
The next step for Raether’s Enzyme was to send the manuscript off to a professional for copyediting. Years of work as a coder taught me that no matter how good you think your code is, you really should get someone to test it. That someone needs a keen eye for weakness, diligence, persistence, talent, and a very particular set of skills. If you want your software to be worthy of a customer’s time and money, it behooves you to get someone with those skills to challenge your code to be the best it can be.
The written word is like computer code. Errors in syntax and grammar can crash the interpreter in the middle of informing or entertaining the reader. Ambiguous references can leave the reader in an undetermined state. Inefficient use of language can lead the reader to look for a better solution. If you want your book to be worth a reader’s time and money, it behooves you to employ a good editor to spot your surviving errors and suggest improvements.
If one editor is essential and good, would two be better? Surely! I am a novice novelist and Raether is my first novel. There is room for improvement. Enough room that writerly insecurity alone was enough to rationalize hiring more than one copyeditor. I didn’t want to admit that I was acting to quell mere insecurity, so I came up with additional reasons.
- Redundancy improves robustness. Raether is 114,000 words long. Even the best editors will miss or excuse something in all that text. The more editors you employ, the lower the odds of an error getting past all of them. If one editor fails to deliver for whatever reason—say, a pandemic–the other(s) might still come through.
- A good editor is hard to find. The internet presents a cornucopia of talented freelancers with solid resumes and glowing testimonials. It might be hard to lose, but how hard is it to win? To find the editor with the skills to polish your book, the diligence to make it happen on schedule, and who you otherwise want to work with in the future. The odds of making that match go up the more editors you work with. (You can also improve the odds via word-of-mouth referral, but that requires having friends who know editors.)
- Two more people will have read my story. Granted, an editing pass isn’t a normal reading and I’d be paying them to do so, but it still counts. Doesn’t it?
After this, the whole experimental methodology thing began to take a familiar turn away from rigor. Working with gradstudentfreelancers.com had been productive on the (premature) proofreading. The editor had pointed out some copyedit-level errors gratis. I knew he had more to contribute to the project. He would also enjoy a head start to the extent copyeditors must suppress their curiosity as readers about “what happens next?” and he knew the answer.
The search for a second editor led me to reedsy.com. The site features a marketplace of freelance professionals from various disciplines who post descriptions of their backgrounds and selections from their portfolios. Client ratings and testimonials provide additional information. An elegant search feature makes finding the right candidates straight-forward. Finding the right one for the job in this talented pool remains challenging for a noob like myself.
For my first pass, I searched for copyeditors who work on mash-up genre fiction. That produced a nice, small slice of the professional pie. One editor had a background and an eclectic portfolio that resonated with me. We exchanged messages and he cheerfully agreed to provide a sample edit of an excerpt from Raether. The excerpt was a slice from a few chapters with a good mix of dialog and narration. It also featured my which/that error. He returned the sample edit, Raether and my first contact with professional copyediting. He had fixed my which/that and various other minor errors, which was all to the good. He also rather aggressively changed my simple saids and askeds to more descriptive dialog tags.
There is a style schism in the writing world between those who limit dialog tags to said/asked, and those who like to mix in other verbs for more nuanced tone and general variety. In Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, he rules in favor of only using said. Cormac McCarthy declines to use any dialog tags, or quotation marks for that matter. Numerous beloved and successful writers have characters that whisper, grumble, reply, and query. I decided early in the writing of Raether that I would only break with the said/asked camp on special occasions. As a rule, I treated dialog tags as a form of punctuation and used them to slip pauses into characters’ lines and clarify the speaker in scenes where more than two characters were talking.
My initial reaction to the sample edit was: Dude, I wouldn’t allow me to make a stylistic change this sweeping at this late date. I cooled off and realized that his edits were, in their own way, cool. This fellow was engaged in the project on a level where he was creatively making it better. By the lights of his preferred style. It wasn’t my style. If I hired him but told him not to improve my dialog tags, I’d be asking him to fight his preferences and suppress his creativity for the length of the project. I’d be asking him to not do his best work. I declined his offer and revised my search criteria to cover the mystery and thriller genres.
In the interest of efficiency, if not fairness, I approached five new editors with my work proposal. One was no longer available and declined. The remaining four graciously provided sample edits. The number of corrections and suggests varied. Some went light with their virtual red pens. All had useful observations and Chicago Manual of Style corrections. One editor stood out for her ability to both correct the text and suggest improvements without trampling on the story’s voice. She found my which/that, moved the text towards reconciliation with Chicago, made good suggestions, and highlighted patterns of weakness that I had missed in my many passes over the manuscript. She was a good match for the project.
I accepted her offer. We exchanged messages and I briefed her regarding some of the manuscript’s eccentricities. She started the work on schedule, asked a few pointed questions during her edit, and delivered her final edit before the scheduled deadline. During the coronavirus outbreak of 2020. I was (and am) happy with both her work product and with the overall collaboration.
The Double-edit Interferometer
Sending one manuscript to two editors is akin to a double-slit experiment.
The interference pattern that emerges when you compare and combine the edits can tell you more about the text and the process than you would learn by looking at only one or either independently. In many places, the editors agree on a change. The editing waves reinforce each other. I don’t recall any cases where they recommended conflicting changes. There was no destructive interference.
The interesting part of the interference pattern broke the interferometer metaphor. Each editor made corrections that the other declined. One enforced Chicago’s deprecation of using capital letters for emphasis. Raether’s narration is sympathetic to the POV character of a given scene. The protagonist mentally capitalizes certain words: the Program, the Look, The Thing on the Screen. That edit lowercases these to align the manuscript with Chicago. The other editor left Megan’s capitalizations alone, but lowercased ‘internet’. It turns out that the 17th edition of Chicago declares that in general use, the Internet is now the internet. I had to buy my own copy of the style guide after searching the Internet internet failed to resolve the dispute for me.
Both editors were generous with their observations and suggestions, bringing complementary strengths to the project. The manuscript is better for their efforts. The strange curves of the story are polished so that the reader’s eyes might glide over them. Any surviving errors are artifacts of my combining their edits or stubbornly resisting their advice.
Raether’s Enzyme is ready to go to the book designers.
I can’t help but think of an old computer science joke:
Every program can be made one byte smaller. There is always one more bug. Therefore, at the end of optimization and debugging, all programs are one byte long, and wrong.