Et tu, Editor?

 “The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.” ― Tom Waits

Contemporary editing doesn’t kick any ass, either.

I have long said the Internet needs editors. Without the space restrictions imposed by newsprint or magazine pages, even professional journalists tend to yammer on well past the point where anyone cares what they’re saying. This is why I make every effort to keep these posts to between 600 – 800 words, the standard length of a traditional newspaper column. (Interviews tend to run longer depending on the subject’s responses.)

As for the quality of what editing takes place, even venues with professional editors are guilty. To use a trivial example that most clearly shows the point, ledes are routinely buried these days. I first noticed this when reading the sports pages, where one can sometimes go several paragraphs before learning the score of the game, which is the first thing people look for when they read a recap.

It's in novels where this really irritates me. The last several books I’ve read are rife with the kinds of errors writers may make through having too tight a deadline, or simple copy and paste errors that, frankly, are the sole reasons copy editors exist. While I do not excuse the writer altogether – after all, it’s our name on the cover – editors might want to do a better job, considering how much we hear about their importance.

A few examples from my recent reading:

·       “Anything under .50 is small caliber.” Really? A .50 caliber machine gun is what they used in World War II to shoot down fighter planes. Currently, the Desert Eagle, often considered the most powerful handgun in the world (Dirty Harry notwithstanding) is a .50 cal. Correct me if I’m wrong, but “small” caliber handguns are .22s and .25s; maybe a .32. A .38 or a 9 mm is not a small caliber weapon.

·       Speaking of 9 mm, it’s ‘nine,’ not ‘point nine,’ which is how one has to read the ever popular ‘.9 mm.’ A .9 mm bullet would have a diameter of 0.035 inches, which is about 3/64 of an inch, or about the size of the tip of a dart. It had better hit you someplace critical if it’s going to do much damage.

·       Using the same word or phrase too close together and/or too often. I confess to being prone to this one myself and spend much of my editing and rewriting time seeking them out for correction. They happen most often during revisions when the author cuts, copies, or rewrites a sentence or paragraph and loses track of what exactly is where. Again, the author should catch that, but authors are focused on creating; the editor’s sole purpose is to catch these things.

·       Scenes or conversations that cover the same information multiple times. Again, I often do this in first drafts, as I’m not sure which I like better and know I’ll be by here again. Once again, this is the author’s responsibility, but pointing out such things is what the editor is paid to do.

·       Last, and maybe most egregious, I recently read a book where the tenses changed erratically throughout. I understand this in dialog; some people talk that way. The narrative tense needs to be consistent, certainly within a paragraph.

I was lucky when working with a publisher. Most of my books were edited by Chris Rhatigan and are better because of his efforts. Over time he came to recognize my stylistic choices and either stopped ‘correcting’ them or made suggestions as to the passage could be improved.

Publishers do less for authors all the time. The least we should be able to expect is a professional editing job. I could guess why it’s not that way, but I would be guessing, and my guesses would not be flattering.

Oh, yeah. This one came in at 663 words, including this sentence. Down from 798, thanks to judicious editing.