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11/21/2005: "The tyranny of editing"
We all have to do it, of course, but it doesn't make it any easier. The pleasure of writing - of creating - brings with it the pain of editing. I'm a writer, for goodness' sake; if I wanted to be pedantic and nitpicky, I'd have become a lawyer. And the pain - it's as if it were a piece of cruel torture that brings pleasure to the publisher - comes in so many forms.
The first is having to read your words again. Not for the second time, not for the third time, but quite possibly for the sixth - even tenth - time. There's only so much delight that can be squeezed from the prose, no matter how lustrous it seemed the first time it hit the page. Even Shakespeare probably got a tad hacked off with having to work his way through Macbeth's contemplation of the uselessness of living for the fifteenth time.
Then there is the problem of suddenly finding that, although you might have written something, after a gap of six months or so, you don't actually know what you meant to say. It might be a simile, a phrase, a sentence, or even a whole paragraph. Perhaps this is a personal thing - perhaps every other member of the CWA re-reads their words with perfect recall of what they meant to say - but every so often I am rather alarmed to read something that apparently I have written that strikes me as (at best) slightly peculiar or (at worst) complete garbage.
Then there is the problem of not being able to read what I have written; I read what I think I've written. Always have, always will. I can read and re-read the same sentence twenty times and still not spot the missing pronoun. This is probably littered with typos and, believe me, I have tried to spot them...
The single most galling thing, though, is the desire of publishers to help you. I have had many fights over the use of words or phrases that I quite like but that the editor seems to think is either too 'obscure' or too 'pompous' (me? pompous?) or too 'intellectual.' I have just begun to edit the fourth Eisenmenger/Flemming book (A World Full of Weeping) and have been told sternly that the Americans mumbled something about not using too many 'difficult' words.
Yes, I sometimes use words that are not in the lowest common denominator of the English lexicon and I do so deliberately.
Because authors love words.
And so, I suspect, do readers.
Keith McCarthy on Monday, November 21st 2005 @ 07:36 PM GMT [link]