I suppose every English major ends up doing a bit of proofreading and editing wherever they end up working. I don’t know if it’s because they can’t help themselves or because we’re among the few who know what a comma splice is—probably a combination of the two. I’ve wielded a red pen at my library for years now. Normally, this isn’t a problem. Most books let me escape into the story and let the words and grammar wash by. The problem comes when I pick up on a critical mass of errors that bring out my inner red pen.
I finished a book this week that triggered my editorial impulses so badly that, even though I enjoyed a lot of the worldbuilding and plot, I can’t review the book here. The biggest issue was repetition. With fantasy and science fiction novels, I expect a few info dumps as the author establishes their setting. I can roll with that. The problem was that the small info dumps kept repeating. Even late in the book, pieces of information popped up as though I hadn’t read them a dozen or more pages previously. Once I noticed the repetition, I started to notice the sentences that didn’t serve a purpose. Before long, my mental red pen was slashing left and right. My brain limped to the end of the book and heaved a huge sigh of relief.
Suppressing my desire to edit for over 300 pages got me to thinking about how much restraint editors have to have. On the one hand, you want them to hunt down every typo, punctuation error, and other obvious problems with the text. On the other, how does an editor distinguish between a mistake and a stylistic choice? I know an editor would go to town on my use of em dashes. (And you’ll pry parentheticals out of my cold, dead hands!) Right now, the Grammarly extension is popping up with all kinds of suggestions because I want my text to sound like how I talk—and how I talk is not the best English—because I think it makes my writing sound friendlier and more engaging. If I actually was an editor, I’d be afraid of changing so many things that whatever I was working on would end up sounding like me, instead of like its actual author.
We usually think of the author as the sole creative force behind a book but, if you’ve read author acknowledgements at the end of the book, you’ll often see authors thanking their editors. This can’t be just because of the proofreading. A good editor can do what the editor of the book I’m not going to review didn’t do: suggest changes to make the text flow, catch gaps where more explanation is needed, watch for unnecessary text, and so much more. I suspect they can also help shape characterization and structure, too. And, all the while, editors have to hold back and be wary of changing the author’s words and vision too much.
Because their touch has to remain undetectable, I suppose this is why we never really hear about editors unless we read the acknowledgements. So, here’s my small reader’s salute to the people with the red pens: thank you!