What is the copyediting process like for authors?
The bad habits, weird obsessions, and overly used gestures my copyeditor weeds out.
This week, it’s back to publishing-related matters, and goodness, gracious have I got some embarrassing content for you. Embarrassing for me, instructive—I hope—for you.
In addition to bringing me a lot of personal challenges, October also brought the first round of my copyedits. The copyediting process comes after all editorial changes with one’s editor are done, the goal being to streamline, strengthen and clarify your hard work on the page into something that is readable, believable, grammatical and factually consistent. In my own terms and definitions, this means:
Readable: Regardless of the style you are writing in, your sentences aren’t unnecessarily complicated or challenging to read.
Believable: People should be wearing, eating, driving, and communicating in ways credible for the time your story takes place in.
Grammatical: I’m not known for my grammar, so I always need help with this.
Factually consistent: Whether you are creating an entirely new world or simply building a timeline for your plot to follow, your book needs to be consistent with the facts, dates, and chronology that you have set up.
These, in my opinion, are the main categories a copyeditor aims to cover, but there’s a super important role played by copyeditors that isn’t often mentioned:
They make you sound far smarter than you are.
Today I’d like to take you behind the scenes of my own copyedit to prove that:
1) even professional writers need professional help.
2) copyeditors should get superhero capes.
I’ve always had good copyeditors, but I’ve been very fortunate to work with one in particular—her first name is Anne—on several of my books, and this woman knows my bad writing habits inside and out.
Here are the things that Anne (politely and most kindly) would like me to do less of:
Overuse italics
Not use double punctuation!?
Use eccentric dialogue tags
Get stuck on certain expressions and physical gestures
Notice when I use the same number over and over like someone possessed
Now, let’s go inside my copyedits to watch Anne try to course-correct me on some of the above points, starting with my documented reliance on whacky dialogue tags. (I say documented because in the New York Times review of my second novel TOUCH, the reviewer, Annalisa Quinn, wrote “Maum’s writing is easy, eager and colloquial, as oxygenated as ad copy. People ‘quip’ or ‘croon’ rather than speak.”
Dialogue tags, in case you are wondering, are phrases that identify who is saying what, before, during or after the thing was said. He asked, she said, they wondered, the baby replied. Generally, you’re not supposed to get too creative with your dialogue tags, but I go overboard, as you’re about to see. Here is an example of Anne’s gentle pleas to calm my dialogue tags down: