Josh Olson raised the roof this week with his blisteringly straight-forward rant in the New York Village Voice, I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script.
I’ve never seen one of his movies, I’ve never read any of his scripts, I’d never heard of him before I read his article, and I’m not even sure I’m spelling his name right. But I like Mr. Olson.
Do you know why?
Because he’s asking people to show some respect for a professional writer’s time and skills.
There’s a good reason to want a professional writer to read your work, and that’s that a professional is skilled. A professional knows how to spot the mistakes and the successes, knows how to do it successfully without the mistakes, and knows why and how they know. These are all great qualities to bring to a new manuscript.
And if they’re exceptionally skilled, they might even know how to impart this information in a kind way that does not crush the delicate ego of the author of the work. Yet another great quality, and not one to be taken lightly.
But how does a professional know all these things?
They LEARNED.
They weren’t granted this knowledge at birth by the good fairies. They didn’t get it as a door prize when they came down the chute. They aren’t just luckier than everyone else out there who wishes they were a professional writer.
They paid their dues and LEARNED.
Anyone who wants the benefit of a professional’s dues can also pay their dues—by investing their own time, money, energy, or years of their life to learning the same stuff. If they’re in a hurry, they even have the option of buying a short-cut! You can do that. Anyone can.
All you need is a really good editor.
Now, you guys are lucky. You already know an editor. Not only that, you know a really good editor. You know a really good editor who also happens to have a personal stake in being as kind as possible to aspiring writers—she believes in being a good person, she believes in fiction, and she’s willing to put a certain amount of her karma out there to help nice, sincere, struggling writers get accepted by agents and publishers.
You know a really good, kind, cheap editor.
Why am I so cheap if I’m so good? Because I recently lost my gravy train in the world of salaried professional editing and have had to start building freelance clientele from scratch. A year from now, I will not be this cheap. But right now I am.
Not everyone out there knows a really good, kind, cheap editor or knows how to find one, so they sometimes wind up violating common courtesy in their pursuit of a career as a writer. But just because they don’t know where to buy a short-cut doesn’t mean they can’t invest their own time and energy and years. Those are all dues, too.
So please spread the word, people: Show respect to other writers.
Pay your own dues.
I loved that article – felt like the author and anyone who read it and “got it” were kindred spirits! Funny thing, I was just thinking about emailing a nice editor. (I’m a nice editor too, but even editors need editors the way doctors need doctors.)
Absolutely! That’s why I referred to fixing the structure in my own story (in comments on an earlier post) as doing my own dentistry.
Embarrassingly enough, the hardest part about editing your own work is catching typos, which of course are the most obvious errors to the passing reader. When I graduated from high school, I scored low on only one section of the SAT. I didn’t bother to find out what section it was, just went on with my life and became a typesetter, for whom catching typos is (was) a MAJOR preoccupation. Years and years later I discovered that that was the one section of the SAT in which I failed—rather spectacularly—to shine.
It figures.
I got your email about editing! Yes, my schedule is opening up a bit next week, as I’m just finishing work on a couple of full novels. I look forward to reading yours!
Victoria
Oh,snap!
Will your current clients get grandfathered in at your current low, low rates? 😉
Kathryn
Seriously,
I’m on page 20/50 of the copy and line edit you did for me.
I honestly thought, when I sent the pages to you, you would be hard pressed to find any mistakes. I kinda, sorta thought, “This is going to be a waste of money.” I personally, have gone through these pages many times and corrected ALL of my mistakes.
It’s humbling and amazing to see how wrong I was. Afterall, this is the same manuscript that my mother, my sisters,and my best friends all said was absolutely perfect. Don’t change a thing.
It’s incredible to see the awkward sentences repaired and the extra little prepositional and descriptive phrases,(enlightening phrases, I thought) removed, leaving me with a much tighter story.
I’m very glad I found you and, although I think it would be wonderful to call you a friend, at this point in my novel’s life, I feel fortunate that I can hire you to be my editor.
Kathryn
To any and all of you considering editing of your work, finished or in progress, I’ll tell you that when Victoria edited the first part of my novel the suggestions, large and small, made an important contribution to the novel as a whole.
Your suggestions, Victoria, made an impact which I used elsewhere, to the benefit of the story’s appeal. Especially in regards to dialog.
I can hardly wait until you see the rest. So thanks, Victoria!
Kathryn and Jeffrey, you guys are so darn cool! I’m going to hire you as my PR team.
Well, when I inherit that pile from my rich great-uncle whom I never knew existed. . .hey, wait a minute.
Thanks for your fabulous recommendations!
Victoria
If you look at something long enough, you’ll eventually surpass mistakes that another editor might be able to see at a quick glance. It’s nice to have a second glance. Atleast for me.
Hi Camarillo,
Do you mean you’ll find the mistakes? Or you’ll surpass them—you’ll go beyond them into the land of Ultimate Mistakes and Really Amazing Screw-Ups?
My own manuscripts do tend to take fascinating little detours through this land—rather predictably, I must say.
Some publishing professionals put it out there that this happens from “over polishing” your work, convincing many (many) aspiring amateurs to cling to their first drafts in the amazing hope that their writing is just that good the first time around. These are not very good publishing professionals.
That’s a fallacy. There is no such thing as “over polishing” your work. You keep polishing until it’s right. That’s all. If you stop before then, it’s still “under polished.”
And, yes, a professional editor knows how to spot the things to fix and the things that, should you fix them, you will have to go back and un-fix later.
Victoria