As I mentioned last week, the copyedited version of Harry, Revised was en route from Bloomsbury and I was looking forward to getting into it and seeing what was involved.
Well.
A copyedited manuscript is truly a remarkable document. Back when I attended NYU, I was managing editor of the student newspaper The Washington Square News. Part of my work including conforming copy to Associated Press style. My well-thumbed copy of the AP Stylebook, our sacred text, retains its place of honor on my shelf to this day but, in the intervening years, I'd lost sight of the whole question of a consistent, institutional style. Hell, that's an ongoing problem at TEV – some titles are in italics, some in quotes. All in all, it's a bit helter skelter around here.
And so, when I opened the manuscript to a sea of red markings – not a page goes unmarked - I was momentarily taken aback. A fairly representative page is below:
However, as I spent time thumbing through the pages, it quickly became apparent that the vast majority of notes were simply changes made to conform to Bloomsbury's house style, governed by a variety of sources noted on the accompanying "style sheet," in which the rules of the game are spelled out. The style sheet also includes a list of proper nouns used in the book with spellings confirmed and this is a singularly interesting document which marries fictional names (Harry Rent, Anna Weldt) with real ones (Wilshire Boulevard, Century City).
The majority of the changes are things like ensuring ellipses are done in a consistent style. (Three, never four.) The correct use of em dashes (between clauses) versus hyphens (usually between words in compound modifiers). Including a comma before "and" when the last of a series. Numbers spelled out. And so on.
Where the copyeditors impress me the most, though, is in their remarkable attention to detail. I don't know how they manage to keep so much in their heads – it's superhuman. In one chapter of my novel, a character has a photo of her son taped to her bedside lamp. When she moves into a new apartment several chapters later, the photo is framed. Somehow, the copy editor noticed, remembered and thought to ask me about it. Other mistakes are just embarrassing – starting one paragraph in the morning and ending it in the afternoon. The smell of perfume hanging in the air for more than two hours. Things I should have caught but, by the 25th (or should I say "twenty-fifth") read, all blurs together.
There are a few spots where, of course, I don't agree. Most of these occur around the question of streamlining my prose. Sometimes I use a few words too many, and I'm also guilty of using the passive voice on occasion, and those recommended changes I'm good with. But other times, although there are still too many words technically speaking, there's a rhythm of prose, a musicality that I'm going for even at the expense of extra words and that's where the blue pencil starts marking "STET" – the word proofreaders use to indicate that the original should stand unchanged. Whether my stets will be subject to further discussion, I don't yet know.
I've already gone through the manuscript once, checking all the proofreading marks and either agreeing (in which case I am instructed to leave them alone) or disagreeing (in which case I use a dotted underline and the word "STET"). Now begins the longer, slower read in which I go line by line through the thing one more time. I've been advised that if I want to make any more changes, now is the time, so that's what's on the boards for the next week.
Thomas Carlyle described genius as "an infinite capacity for taking pains." By his measure – and mine – the unsung copyeditor is most surely a genius.
I read so many books these days that barely seem copyedited at all... You should be glad yours is getting the royal treatment.
By the way, I really enjoyed this page.
Posted by: amy, la petite americaine | October 09, 2007 at 05:23 AM
If you were really happy with your copyeditor (and it sounds as though you were), you can always request to have the same person on your next book; your publisher will usually make the attempt to hire them again then.
If you're interested in the minutiae of how we keep so many items in our heads, you might be interested in my post about the copyediting process. I describe a lot about it there. :-)
Posted by: Deanna Hoak | October 09, 2007 at 06:14 AM
Interesting. For the most part, these are pretty straight-forward, but it appears that their house style is against "split infinitives". That would drive me crazy. (I much prefer "be effectively whittled" to "effectively be whittled".)
Posted by: Richard | October 09, 2007 at 06:20 AM
Copy editors are sainted individuals, no doubt, but yours missed the missing "a" before "formidable 1,276 pages."
Posted by: Josh | October 09, 2007 at 06:23 AM
But they mean different things, and so the choice must be the writer's.
What's Dantes-esque? More than one Dante?
Posted by: Timothy | October 09, 2007 at 07:33 AM
ah, i love the smell of red pen in the morning...
Posted by: grackyfrogg | October 09, 2007 at 07:40 AM
Edmund Dantes is the protagonist of Count of Monte Cristo, Timothy.
Posted by: Erik | October 09, 2007 at 07:49 AM
It helps if the copy editor is up on pop culture. In one novel, the name Jimmy Hendricks got past the copy editor.
Posted by: Richard | October 09, 2007 at 08:23 AM
Congratulations on getting to this part of the publishing process! It must feel so close now, and at the same time like it's still another million years until you're done with everything that has to happen before the book comes out.
Thanks for the appreciative bits about the copy editor, too; haven't seen too many posts like that on the Web. Usually we're the bad guys, massacring gemlike prose with our red pens and our mechanical rules.
Posted by: Jeff | October 09, 2007 at 09:13 AM
Mark,
What a fun post. Have you read Nicholson Baker's essay on the history of punctuation? It's in one of his essay collections, and records his struggle with his copyeditor for The Mezzanine over hyphenated compounds and hyrbid punctuation (comma-dash, I think).
Posted by: Nan Cohen | October 10, 2007 at 01:37 AM
Mark, nice to see that you also use Times New Roman. And, better to have a fastidious copyeditor than a sloppy one! Good luck with the line-by-line and page-by-page re-reading.
Posted by: bambina | October 10, 2007 at 03:25 AM
Authors like you are a gift to copyeditors. Thanks for letting us do what we're paid to do instead of complaining every inch of the way! :)
Posted by: Leah | October 10, 2007 at 11:26 AM
that is exactly why i urge copyeditors not to use red pencils--no other color is as upsetting to see :)
Posted by: Julie | October 11, 2007 at 02:03 PM
Hate to be a pedant, but as we're talking about copy-editing: Edmond Dantès is the protagonist of The Count of Monte Cristo, Erik. Which I'm pleased to see the copy-editor above has caught the accent.
Posted by: Chaz | October 12, 2007 at 06:32 AM
If you're truly grateful to your copy editor, ask your editor to get his name and put him in the acknowledgments. It's rarely done but greatly appreciated.
Posted by: julunki | October 15, 2007 at 05:12 AM
Way ahead of you, julunki!
Posted by: TEV | October 15, 2007 at 11:01 AM