When to Hold ‘Em

 

I got a PM this morning asking me about editing—apparently I’d let slip some editing frustration on line.

“Does this ever go away?”

Short answer? I’m sorry, no.

Long answer?

Well, to start with, this question cracks me up. The person who asked it was asking me like I was an expert—and here’s the thing. I keep thinking that if I was an expert at editing, I wouldn’t need any editing. That manuscript would pop POOF, fully grown out of my head, like Athena from Zeus, and WHAM! We’d have a full blown brilliant masterpiece, the book that will sell a ton, cure cancer, advance civil rights and end war.

Alas, no.

Practice—for some of us—does not make perfect.

I mean, I know there are some writers who edit their own and excel at it. Some writers outline and follow that baby to the n’th degree, and then follow up with a brilliant CMOS orgy and a steam shower that leaves all participants clean, gorgeous, and totally sexed out.

I tend to leave my manuscripts panting, sweaty, and covered in… typos.

Sorry, editing team—I was on to my next partner, because, hey, squirrel! Bored now.

And I don’t do it on purpose. I have turned in manuscripts I’ve been sure are perfect, only to have them scrawled in red like a grade school delinquent’s paper.

Which is pretty much when I stopped trying to make them perfect. Because… well—true story.

I’m currently on the third edit—the clean up edit—of a manuscript which features a couple of rec-league soccer/IT guys who fall in love after a quickie grope in the front of a Honda Accord. These guys aren’t stupid, but they’re not a brain trust or experts in any branch of the humanities including grammar, either.

But the one thing they know is soccer.

I have been a soccer mom for thirteen years. I went from completely ignorant of soccer to being able to recognize some good plays, to knowing the rules, to (at this point) being so completely sick of the whole thing that I would pay myself to forget I ever learned the rules or the plays or what FIFA meant or why they’re a bunch of douchebags.

I wrote about these guys playing soccer.

Only to have one of my editors tell me that s/he is a soccer expert, and I was doing it wrong.

At first I was mortified. All this time I’ve been saying “offsides” when it was really “offside”? All this time I’ve been talking about “the half” when it was really “halftime”? Holy cow—do I feel like an idiot for calling them “points” instead of “goals”.

Then I rolled my eyes at myself and started to ask the people around me—my kids, who play the game, my husband who coaches, refs, and runs the soccer board, and the other soccer moms, some of them much more fanatical than I am about the game in general.

“Hey, Mate—what do you call it when an offensive player passes the ball to another player who is standing beyond the last defender?”

“Offsides?”

“Hey, Squish—when do you guys get your first snack?”

“The half, Mom, you know that!”

“Hey, Tara—what’s the score of the boy’s game?”

“Tie—they have two points, we have two points.”

And it hits me.

Not that I’m right—because it’s not about that.

I am communicating—in this case with people in my area. Now, in this case it means I don’t change my edit and I have to write everything I just told you guys in the margin of my manuscript, but in the larger sense it means something much bigger.

Communication is difficult. Thoughts to words, words to voice—that has led us to wars, death, destruction, and Darwin award winners shooting themselves over the last BBQ rib.

Now add a wrinkle. Thoughts to words, words to symbols, symbols to words, words to symbols, symbols to thoughts…

Holy God—it’s a wonder any of us ever write anything down that another person can understand EVER. Ever ever ever ever EVER.

It’s like a game of mental telephone played between the writer and the reader. There’s not one step or two steps, there’s five steps during which any number of things can go horribly horribly wrong.

Add to that regional differences, cultural differences, family habits of speech—I once had a three-editor fight because I did not realize that “star of stage, screen, and outer space” was a phrase my father had invented and nobody else on earth knew what it meant.

That’s the difficulty in communication.

And that’s what editors are there to facilitate.

Uniform grammar doesn’t make our thoughts uniform, it makes the expression of complex thoughts just a little closer to mathematics and a little further from advanced sorcery. We’ve all seen the memes—“Good grammar is the difference between helping your Uncle Jack off a horse and helping your uncle jack-off a horse.” If uniform punctuation indicates a difference between noun, adjective, and verb, we should be all for that shit.

A good friend of mine—and my first professional editor—once said, “Editors are like glasses—our job is not to change what the reader sees, it’s to make things clearer.” And that’s where our jobs as writers comes in. It’s our job to make sure we know what we want the reader to see.

In my case, I want the reader to see that this is Nor-Cal rec league soccer, and not FIFA competition level.   My guys are going to say “offsides”, “points”, and “the half”—but that’s not the editor’s fault, is it? The editor was just trying to make things clear.

So no—the editing process is never going to get easier. It amounts to a handful of people trying to make one person’s vision clear to thousands of people. It’s always going to be a tussle between, “This is what I wanted people to see!” and “Are you sure that’s what you wanted people to see?”

And that’s good. Writers are usually pretty fluent in translating symbols to thoughts to words—but that doesn’t mean their translation and interpretation is necessarily going to fit into the worldview of their audience. Editors help us see that sometimes the living we do up in our head really is madness, and maybe we want to join the rest of the human race and write there for a while.

And sometimes, it’s our job to help them see that what we see is unexpected, and that’s why we do what we do.

So, writers? Know your vision. Know what you’re trying to show people. And be able to accept help doing that—because this thing we’re doing? It’s a human thing—a necessary thing.

But it’s not an easy thing. And we all need a little help with the thing that’s not easy. Even when it’s not holding our ground.