Despite what I hear on the street, there are many, many kinds of editors. Inevitably when I meet someone for the first time and I say I have recently moved from being a production editor to working as a freelance copy editor, this person fantasizes aloud about my sitting in a large leather chair under an amber lamp scribbling away on a 500-page manuscript on my lap, taking copious notes and making sweeping changes, then engaging the author in long discussions that lead to a major breakthrough and eventually improve the novel.
I do none of these things of course, as I consider this to be developmental editing, which I have done on occasion but find to be out of my comfort zone at this point in my career. I have great admiration for people who do this, and I admit to feeling jealousy at times. To be able to get right to the heart of the work, to see how to best express the author's intended meaning, then to steer the author into seeing how to bring the characters and story to their highest level through revision ... it's quite a bit of magic to me.
Here is an interesting post by a woman who apparently does just this in children's publishing. I think it's fascinating.
I do none of these things of course, as I consider this to be developmental editing, which I have done on occasion but find to be out of my comfort zone at this point in my career. I have great admiration for people who do this, and I admit to feeling jealousy at times. To be able to get right to the heart of the work, to see how to best express the author's intended meaning, then to steer the author into seeing how to bring the characters and story to their highest level through revision ... it's quite a bit of magic to me.
Here is an interesting post by a woman who apparently does just this in children's publishing. I think it's fascinating.
1 Comments:
At Wed Sep 26, 07:34:00 PM,
Schizohedron said…
I know that fantasized image is inaccurate. Clearly, your assistant would claim the large leather chair and gaze lazily at your outrage.
I've enjoyed moving back into editing over these past three-ish months. I do a range of editing: copyediting of incoming MSS, production editing in the sense of actually loading text into Quark and editing it further there, and I suppose a touch of developmental editing most recently. I helped a 450-word essay arise from a ambling, 1,500-word sprawl of recollections. Finding the author's meaning, as you mention, was paramount; I didn't want to make it my story, but rather, to find her story deep in the mass of words.
I don't know if I have the tenacity and sensitivity to do so across a novel or academic text. I imagine the level of collaboration required, vs. what I exercised when editing the journals where we both worked, would be two or three orders of magnitude more frequent and close. And maybe emotional. I suspect there's a bit of the midwife in a good DE.
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