Jeri Smith-Ready

First the forest, then the trees

This blog post started off as a brief hey-this-is-what's-new-with me post, and turned into a whole essay on the the different kinds of edits. This is why I have trouble finding time to blog--you cannot shut me up.

I turned in my rewrite of Shade on Monday. On Friday, my editor will give me her line edits, and the final version will go to the copyeditor on September 9.

What are line edits, you ask? (Let's pretend you asked, so that I don't look pretentious.) There are usually two stages to an editor's actual editorial work on a book. The first one is called...hmm, I don't know what it's called. Let's call it the Global Edit, because that sounds very impressive and sort of humanitarian. The Global Edit^TM tackles the Big Issues, such as:

-- Character X feels underdeveloped and pointless to the story; maybe s/he can be combined with another character to serve the same purpose? I mean, does the protagonist really need TWO drama-riddled, arachnophobic, Vespa-riding best friends? Hmm?
-- Subplot Y fails to be resolved. We never do find out who made those crop circles in the shape of Dick Cheney's head.
-- The pacing of Chapters 5-9 was so slow, I sold them to a pharmaceutical company as a powerful anesthesia agent (patent pending).

So the writer gets the Global Edit and spends at least a few weeks (God willing) doing a rewrite. For all of my books from Voice of Crow through Bad to the Bone, this stage involved giant overhauls to the plot and characters and took about two months each.

For Shade, this major rewrite wasn't necessary, and here's why: A month before it was due, I gave the oh-so-rough draft to a pair of beta readers who should be awarded medals of valor. It gave me the chance to see the big-picture problems with it, which I fixed to the best of my ability before turning it in to my editor at Simon Pulse (Annette Pollert) on June 1.

Anyway, then the writer submits the rewritten version to her editor (which I did this Monday). Sometimes the editor sends back this version with "line edits." At this stage, the editor flags specific details in the writing--clunky dialogue, weak descriptions, or other Things-That-Make-Her-Go-Eww. Usually he or she won't correct things like grammar or spelling--that's the copyeditor's job.

So if the Global Edit is the forest, the Line Edit is the trees. Books are made of trees, which come from forests, so...there.

Keep in mind that not every editor works this way. Some will combine the global edit (you're used to the term now, so we're switching to lower case) with the line edit. My editor at Pocket, Jen Heddle, does this. The lovely part is that I can then ignore half of her line edits because they apply to scenes that I've axed. Efficient (for me, at least)! She also does a second line edit on the new version, but it's combined with the copyeditor's review. So that manuscript will have notes for me in two different handwritings and colors. Pretty!

As for copyediting, we'll leave that for another post. I hope this has been an enlightening glimpse inside my little corner of the publishing process. As you can see, building the perfect book has many steps, several of which involve colored pencils.

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Labels: SHADE series, writing life

• posted by Jeri @ 1:17 PM
• 4 comments