August 29, 2002
Me Fail English? Unpossible
Being Copy Edited is No Fun

Now that I'm an internationally unknown author, I thought it was time to actually get some representation and have someone who knows what the hell they're talking about negotiate my next book contract. It isn't really greed, since I never expect to make much money at this game. It's more a desire to let someone else do the work. I'm tired of mailing things out, keeping track of stuff, reading contracts, and promoting myself—it sucks. I want an agent so someone will do some of that shit for me, because, as you all know, there's plenty of shit I already gotta do. I sent out a huge number of self-promoting packets to a bunch of literary agents, begging someone to take pity on me and agree to read the manuscript of my next novel. Miraculously, one did, and then actually agreed to take me on as a client. They then suggested, quite strongly, that I have my agent-winning manuscript copy-edited as soon as possible by a professional because, as with most of my manuscripts, it had been written by someone possessed of a third-grade-level grasp of English Grammar. I got style, bubba, but I got no control. Lord knows my Jesuit education managed to teach me nothing but fear of strange men in black robes.

To see them trying to subtly edit the story bothered me, for two reasons: One, they were being extremely literal in sections which required a little bit of imagination. . .Two, their suggested changes would make the story Suck More

So I took my new agent's advice and found a professional copy-editor to look the MS over and eradicate the worst of my gaffes. Some of the grammar-gaffes, though, are on purpose—you know, arty. Poetic license. That jazz. Of course, when you start telling people that your errors are ‘on-purpose' they look at you with slightly pitying, slightly irritated expressions of distrust, figuring that you're just trying to convert an embarrassing faux passe into a laudable attribute. Usually, of course, they're right to suspect this, but in this case I mean it: sometimes I wrote bad English on purpose, dammit, and I'm sticking to it.

The copy-editor I hired did a great job, and certainly improved the manuscript from a technical point of view. They also attempted to improve the novel artistically, which I found strange. I work for a publishing company, and deal with copy-editors all the time. Sometimes they're compelled to re-write troublesome passages in books. Sometimes, especially with authors who are not natural writers, they're asked to edit the text heavily. But in general they're very businesslike, and restrict themselves to fixing mistakes and correcting grammar, which is what I expected my copy editor to do. To see them trying to subtly edit the story bothered me, for two reasons: One, they were being extremely literal in sections which required a little bit of imagination, refusing, for example, to comprehend that it's okay of me to assume my reader's are smart enough to know when the point of view switches from one character to another (the fifth time I read ‘this is confusing to the reader' I began to think maybe they weren't kidding). Two, their suggested changes would make the story Suck More, plain and simple.

Why? Simple: there are people in this world who think that creative writing can be taught. They attend classes, they read books on the subject, they attempt to boil everything down into a bunch of rules which can then be followed, much like those step-by-step screenwriting books which tell you how many pages of script every section of movie should be. You can tell people who have embraced this concept of writing by their insistence on a straightforward narrative, their resistance to anything that stinks of ‘postmodern' stylistics, and their frequent use of the following term: show don't tell.

Ever take a Creative Writing course in school? If you did you probably heard the phrase "show don't tell" about a thousand times before the term was over. It's the mantra of writing student. You can tell people who have really embraced the idea that writing can be taught by their frequent quoting of this little tidbit of writing arcana. It's not a bad piece of beginning advice, since a lot of immature writers of fiction do tend to overexplain and over narrate, and underestimate their audience, and it's meant to remind that that's it's better to let the reader figure things out for themselves than to simply state what's going on. Take a short story like D.H. Lawrence's "The Rocking Horse Winner"; would it really have been as good a story if Lawrence had simply written a paragraph about how disturbing the little kid's sexual maturity was for his Mother? Or a paragraph concerning the desperate desire for more money which spurs the child onto his toy horse?

The problem with this piece of beginner's advice is that ultimately it doesn't really mean anything. You can comment ‘show don't tell' on just about anything in a story. At some point, you have to bite the bullet and explicitly state something. You can't "show" everything. Sometimes you have to tell. The admonition to ‘show' not ‘tell' is meant merely to make writers think about what they're doing with language, to get them to reconsider the way in which they convey information to their audience. Unfortunately, for some people—especially people whose last attempts at creative writing was in a college class—this admonition becomes a law which they then bandy about like a billy club, ordering everyone to ‘show, don't tell'. The minute I see this phrase in a comment on my work, I stop paying attention. I'll fucking tell my readers something if I see fit, thank you very much, and if you lack the imagination to appreciate the fact that sometimes that works just as well, well, it's not my problem.

Of course, the copy editor isn't part of a huge right-wing conspiracy to make my writing Suck More, despite their humorless refusal to see any of my zany and impish literary flourishes for the entertaining nonconformity they are. They probably thought it well within their mandate to try to improve the story as much as possible, and I simply disagree with them. There are, of course, plenty of people in this world who think I write like my ass chews gum, and I've heard from a number of them. That's okay. Pick an author, any author, and there will be people convinced that they are hacks. If someone detests your writing, my friends, chances are you're in pretty good company.

Want to tell me my writing sucks? BRING IT ON, HOMBRE!

Jeff