{"id":3096,"date":"2018-02-25T05:56:56","date_gmt":"2018-02-25T10:56:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/?p=3096"},"modified":"2018-02-28T10:30:06","modified_gmt":"2018-02-28T15:30:06","slug":"my-conflict-with-copyeditors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/my-conflict-with-copyeditors\/","title":{"rendered":"Clashing with Copyeditors"},"content":{"rendered":"

Years ago a novelist friend told me that the only thing worse than not being published was being <\/em>published.<\/p>\n

I liked his phrase so much that I later made it the epigram of my second mystery, The Edith Wharton Murders<\/em><\/a>. But at the time, I had no idea what he could mean. Once you got published, what could you have to worry about? Wouldn\u2019t life be perfect?<\/p>\n

That was before I had my first collision with a copy editor.<\/p>\n

In my debut fiction collection, there were a number of stories about Holocaust survivors, and I was careful about having their dialogue reflect that English wasn\u2019t their native language. Like many immigrants, they \u201ctranslated\u201d from the language they knew best, giving their English a Yiddish-inflected twist.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The copy editor didn\u2019t get it and relentlessly standardized every line of their dialogue in one story after another. An author friend I shared this with said that a writer friend was once so enraged by his copy editor’s rampant lack of imagination that he just wrote across Page One of his manuscript, \u201cStet the whole goddamned thing.\u201d I could never do that, because copy editors do catch real problems, but I\u2019ve come to understand the sentiment.<\/p>\n

On a recent book, I found the publisher\u2019s copy editor aggressively changing everything<\/em>\u2014my style, my syntax, my vocabulary\u2014to some imagined idea of good prose. The effect was to make it sound as if it had been written by a computer program slavishly conforming to grammar and style rules without any room for originality.<\/p>\n

This person even had the nerve to commend a word I used as \u201ca good word\u201d–as if I were in elementary school. That was before telling me I wasn\u2019t using it strictly correctly. But after having published nineteen books, hundreds of reviews, essays, and articles, I had my own ideas about what was correct for my book, and I said so.<\/p>\n

The project wasn\u2019t spoiled, but I had to put far more work into restoring my prose, excavating the dull ruin it had been turned into. I was pissed off to have encountered such tone-deaf copy editing.<\/p>\n

And yes, I mean pissed off–not annoyed, irritated, steamed, put out, or vexed.<\/p>\n

Lev Raphael is the author of Writer’s Block is Bunk<\/a> and 24 other books in genres from memoir to mystery.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Years ago a novelist friend told me that the only thing worse than not being published was being published. I liked his phrase so much that I later made it the epigram of my second mystery, The Edith Wharton Murders. But at the time, I had no idea what he could mean. Once you got … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[497,5,1071,1070,466,296,496,214,787,758,1072,380,495],"class_list":["post-3096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-publishing","tag-authors","tag-books","tag-copy-editing","tag-copy-editor","tag-copyediting","tag-editing","tag-publishing","tag-the-writing-life","tag-writers-block-is-bunk","tag-writers-life","tag-writers-voice","tag-writers","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3096"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3096\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3134,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3096\/revisions\/3134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}