December 16th, 2016

I 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.