TOP 10 SIGNS THAT YOU NEED AN EDITOR
By Edward It
1. THERE'S A METHOD TO HIS PUNCTUATION
Just because he showed up on the scene more than 400 years before you did and has a few more Tonys to his credit, Shakespeare has nothing on you. So you decide to update the Graveyard scene in your revisionist one-act entitled, "Hamlet and Eggs" by painting the young, indecisive Prince as a modern day victim of A.D.D., perpetually fondling the joy stick on his PS2, and imbibing on one too many lattés. Only in the midst of thinking through the racing thoughts that are surely plaguing your main character's mind like so many accidentally disturbed hives of bees or not to bees, you forget the risks of misplaced punctuation. Naturally, you don't catch it until your lead executes the scene on opening night (which will double as your closing night). Looking upon the quiet skull at an arm's length, young Prince Hamlet laments: "Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him. Well, Horatio....tennis?" He tosses the old bone over his shoulder as he and his companion stroll off stage eager to exeunt to the nearest watering hole, laden with the knowledge that their careers are all but finished. As for how your star handled your scene, what else could an accomplished actor do? The madness to his Method acting dictates that he had to make your lines work after all, and every playwright knows that if it's on the page, it's probably gonna show up on the stage in one form or another. Your editor, seated behind you, slips you his Playbill with a note hastily scribbled across it: "Psst. Methinks the period takes a comma. The second comma is...out. And Bill would never have said, 'Well.'"
2. MODIFIERS BE WITH YOU
Remember that teenage joke, the bastion of so many zit-adorned males who loved to torment their female peers with: "Hey Judy (Sue, Emily, etc.), you're pretty...ugly." Ouch. But now that you're 15 years older, more mature, and no one can play connect the dots with your face, you wouldn't dare stoop so low. Besides, Judy has gone through a minor makeover herself – she’s now CEO of the defense contractor for which you're interviewing to land the job of Director of Marketing, and she's sitting on the other side of her Lake Erie-sized mahogany desk training her (Wow! When did she get so beautiful?) brown eyes on your résumé like a Stealth Bomber sniffing out a sand bunker under a roof spray painted with six-foot block letters announcing "Gone to Maui. Wish you were here." As her eyes move over every well-crafted paragraph of your illustrious work history, Judy alternates between smiles, smirks, and uh-huh's. She pauses and looks up. Your nails dig deeper into the leather, brass-studded arms of that genuine Louie XIV hot seat in her office, although you're feeling a lot more like Anne Boleyn before Henry the VIII. Your future prospective employer speaks: "So, tell me about your time with Tasty Queen. What encompassed the role of, what was it again?" She glances down at the 20-pound, gray linen page hot off the presses from Kinko’s, "Oh yes... 'Post-Consumer Viscous Waste Eradication Supervisor.’" Feeling like a cow moving under the conveyor belt utility lights of a patty processing plant, you attempt to explain the fine art of transporting used fryer grease once a week from the kitchen to the environmental containment unit out back or what some might less affectionately write off as 'the dumpster.' Your editor? He would have suggested you jump off the ladder of abstraction somewhere around the rung labeled:
Chef Apprentice.
3. DON’T STALK WHEN YOU TALK. WATCH THOSE NON SEQUITURS / TRANSITIONAL SENTENCES
Your uncle’s funeral was touching. You had no idea one man could be so loved by so many. At a healthy and vibrant 105 years old, Uncle Luigi probably had a few detractors along the way, but from all the wet faces during the viewing, you sure wouldn't know it today. Too bad he didn't see that milk truck last Thursday as he stepped off the curb to pick up a cigarette butt during his daily -- and final -- morning jaunt around the block. As several hundred guests exit the funeral parlor, you express your sincerest condolences to your aunt. Aware that she soon will be very much alone, you invite her out for a late afternoon aperitif to toast one more round to "dear Uncle Luigi." She is moved by your overture. "That’s lovely," she says, "where shall we go?" You think out loud. "Well, there's Sam's Cock and Crow on Main, but that place is usually dead this time of day." Gripped by a sudden sense of horror, you mobilize to dig out of a looming hole widening beneath you with every forthcoming utterance. Your timing is almost…deadpan. Grinning sheepishly, you redirect: "I mean, it's really quiet there, not much life in the joint...(ouch) um, and I once was stiffed on my Bloody Mary by the bartender (ouch again). I was dying to pay my tab and split. I mean--" Forget it: you're buried. Some people simply don't know how to transition. Then again, some people play in traffic. If writing is, as some experts suggest, really an extension of human language, then before your next utterance, talk to your editor. She'll take a look at your word use, your sentences and your paragraphs, especially those that conclude chapters and sub-chapters in your manuscript or thesis, and recommend the most effective approaches for preserving continuity of thought without, if you will, leaving your prose hemorrhaging.
4. I STINK THEREFORE I AM
Is that a lump in your throat or are you just choking on what your characters should say next? Dialogue. From the moment we proudly voice our first "mama" or "dada," most human beings are instinctively gifted to gab. Although we sometimes later put our respective feet in our mouths, one foot per person, talking with other people is generally the least of our worries. We part our lips and make a statement. We're asked a question, we respond. So why, at times, does it seem easier to break the ice with a first date than to make characters open up and talk from your pages? If your story’s characters are leaving you speechless, you need an editor. S/he will help you and your characters find your voice and theirs. Let's say, for example, your novel stars a dapper but odiferously challenged skunk that happens to possess the introspection of Descartes. After studying the skunk’s profile and the context within which the character speaks, your editor might suggest that this attribution: "Geez, why duzz everybody diss me at parties?" is not as effective (for this particular character) as this one: "Just because I'm special doesn't mean I deserve to be treated like I don't exist."
5. MY LIFE IS FALLING APART. SO ARE MY SENTENCES.
Someone famous once said, "I write like I speak." Good advice. He must have tuned in to how people talk. Because most people, contrary to what you learned in grammar school, speak in sentence fragments. They're a mainstay of great literature (novels, screenplays, speeches, dramatic works, poetry, billboard ad copy, etc.). They're less acceptable when deployed within written communications that require more formal, precise, unequivocal text such as, for example, your Masters thesis, a legal brief, a technical guide, or even the standard corporate memorandum. Of course, many successful CEOs have a rep for sidelining formality and speaking like they do behind closed doors, i.e., in plain terms. A good editor will feel out your text, embrace it, juggle it, consume it, and regurgitate it in a way that truly captures what you wanted to say and as it should be said. If called for, an editor will not hesitate to use sentence fragments. Nor should you. Just make sure you use ‘em at the right time and use ‘em well. Just because Hemmingway was alleged to use fragments with reckless abandon, don’t assume you can start living off a six pack cooling in a cold brook in the middle of a burned out European countryside or take out a charging rhino at 30 yards. Sentence fragments -- like drinking and rhino bagging -- should be handled with care.
6. PARENTHETICALLY SPEAKING (NOT THAT IT MATTERS)
Well, actually, it does (and more often than you would think). Are you a writer who is hell-bent on inserting asides and commentary within your sentences but too afraid that if you take your thinking outside the parenthesis your prose is preordained to lose impact? Or maybe you have managed to break that habit, sneak outside the presumed constraints of those twin sideways smilies, and go the other direction: using quotation marks to punch up the impact of a word or phrase or italics like you were writing on shaky ground (a 7.0 on the Richter, for example). Your editor might ask you to "Take two Valium and call me after the next draft" or, for the more pragmatic within our profession, he or she likely will suggest you go on a quotation mark, parentheses and/or italics diet. (Hey, it's all about "will power," as they say.)
7. WHAT ARE YOU, HYPER-ACTIVE OR JUST PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE?
It used to be that many writers, particularly newbies, couldn't seem to pull their prose out of the passive voice. Then someone suggested they pick up a copy of Professor Strunk's Elements of Style and, next thing you know, they're looking at the passive voice like a vampire who inadvertently encounters garlic while vegetable shopping at the local Farmer's Market. In these uncertain times where speed of expression seems mandatory, (according to some predictions, World War III could break out next week, or a six mile wide, near-Earth object could change course at any moment), the active voice seems to be popping up in literary works ad nauseum. To be sure, most editors, myself included, will choose the active over the passive 99 percent of the time. But there's an inherent beauty in the passive voice that, used at the right moments, can give pause to your prose so that even if you don't survive Armageddon, future archeologists uncovering your manuscript will conclude, "If this writer were alive today, we might thank him for his reflective insights that he expressed with such care. He must have been quite a talented writer." Then again, they might just assume you had found a good editor.
8. WHY BURY THE LEAD WHEN CREMATION IS CHEAPER?
It's the cardinal sin of journalism, but to watch most local TV newscasts, somewhere between the lead story and the weather, you'd get the impression that many reporters, anchors, news writers, and news directors could use a remedial writing sabbatical...at the Vatican. Indeed, there are times when you want to break the news slowly like, for example, when you're 17 and you're forced to walk five miles home after mistaking the family car's accelerator for the brake, or perhaps you're a pediatrician (or play one on TV) and you have to disclose to the nail biting dad-to-be in the waiting room that, "You know, there just may have been something to that bright light over your house that you say you encountered nine months ago. You see, your wife just gave birth to a three-headed amphibian." But anyone who has ever edited the cover page of a supermarket tabloid or the Wall Street Journal will tell you to "GET TO THE POINT," and in most cases, so will your editor. By the way, did I get to the point?
9. BREVITY IS THE SOUL OF SURVIVAL
Lights are out and it's 20 minutes into the previews at the local multiplex. The theatre is packed. The THX reminds you that it's never too early to set up a layaway plan for micro hearing aids. Buttered popcorn? You're soaking in it. While the rest of the crowd is hypnotized by a potpourri of flashes, booms and VH-1 style rapid-fire cuts firing off before their mesmerized pupils, you suddenly smell smoke. Taking a quick sip of your Pepsi, you stand up, clear your throat and, assuming your best rendition of Dudley Do-right while trying to be respectful to the culture around you, you proceed to describe the anticipated conflagration on the immediate horizon: "There's a dark and pungent gaseous substances emanating from the ventilator 25 meters due north of the woman donning the retro beehive hair style in the third row two seats in from the stage left aisle. I have certain reason to fear for our collective lives." As you clear your throat one more time and take a cursory view of the field of heads ignoring you from around the room, your editor stands up and yells, "FIRE!"
10.
There is no point 10. My editor killed it.
Edward It (but you can call him 'Ed') is a professional editor of more than two decades. He is president of Northern California based
CREDIT THE EDIT (www.credittheedit.com). Ed is always on the prowl for a (don't say 'darn' when you can say) damn good piece of copy.
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