12/16/2016 0 Comments December 16th, 2016I am reading Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, by Mary Norris. Norris writes,
“One of the things I like about my job is that it draws on the entire person: not just your knowledge of grammar and punctuation and usage and foreign language and literature, but also your experience of travel, gardening, shipping, singing, plumbing, Catholicism, midwesternism, mozzarella, the A train, New Jersey, and in turn it feeds your own experience.” This perfectly describes how I feel as an editor. I love bringing my life knowledge and experience to an author’s manuscript. In turn, my life knowledge and experience is added to by the process of editing the author’s work. The experience of encouraging a writer, especially a first-time author, so inspires me that I find I am doing my own best writing in parallel. Another quote from Norris resonated with me. “There is a big fancy word for ‘going beyond your province’: ‘ultracrepidate…’ So much of copy editing is about not going beyond your province. Anti-ultracrepidationism. Writers might think we’re applying rules and sticking it to their prose in order to make it fit some standard, but just as often we’re backing off, making exceptions, or at least trying to find a balance between doing too much and doing too little.” It is for this reason that I prefer to read over a manuscript before I start querying the author (asking questions in the margins). I like to fully understand an author’s piece and the culture behind it before diving in with specific suggestions on how to improve a piece. In my editing, I strike a balance between encouraging the author and providing honest feedback. My role is to help authors create the books they want to write.
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A few years ago, while I was reading, If on a winter's night a traveler, the 1979 novel by Italo Calvino, a passage challenged me to define what it was that I loved so much about reading. Calvino writes,
“Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they are a dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast towards the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books.” While there have been times that I have read to escape from the outside world, my primary reason for reading is to learn about people that I will never have the chance to meet and places that I will never be able to visit. I read to visit times gone by, as well as have experiences that I wouldn’t in the ordinary course of my life. |
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